The Art of Community

By Spencer H/N|ttCalluiii

401

THE ART OF COMMUNITY

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THE ART OF COMMUNITY

by

Spencer Heath MacCallum

Institute for Humane Studies, Inc.
Menlo Park, California

Propiedad de la Eiblioteca
UiilVHiiSlDAD FRANCISCO »1ARR0QUIN

The INSTITUTE FOR HUMANE STUDIES was founded in 1961 as an
independent center to encourage basic research and advanced study for the
strengthening of a free society. Through seminars, fellowships, publications,
and other activities, the Institute seeks to serve a worldwide community of
scholars in education, business, and the professions who are interested in
broadening the knowledge and practice of the principles of liberty.

Copyright © 1970 by
Institute for Humane Studies Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 78-1 12866
Printed in the United States of America

This book acknowledges the transcendent dream

and yet practical temper of
Spencer Heath, F. A. Harper, and Alvin Lowi, Jr.

Foreword

Most of us see major changes in society only after they have come to
pass. We experience the change but without conceiving of it in advance,
and so we do httle or nothing to help forward it. Spencer MacCallum's
distinguished grandfather once described the situation this way: "If you
wait to act until it is perfectly safe to do so, you will be too late for the
opportunity at hand."

A book comes along occasionally that is "before its time." This means
that it will be read and used primarily by a few who can envisage
important things that are to come— once the idea is grasped and
implemented. The Art of Community is that kind of book.

It is commonly implied or asserted outright that an expanding
population necessitates increases in the size of formal organizations in
society and, correspondingly, increases in the use of force to restrict
liberty among persons. With these assumptions, men have accepted more
and more enslavement as the necessary cost of fecundity. Through the
centuries they have developed and accepted all sorts of illiberal devices
for "social control," usually justified on grounds of securing law and
order.

As a setting for reading this book, one may recall the customary
outlines of societal forms which the sociologists are fond of listing. The
"community" problem began when Adam, with his rib, added the second
person to his environment. As conflicting interests arose and bumped
into each other more and more, we are told that there developed these
societal arrangements in a general sequence: (1) families, (2) clans, (3)
tribes, (4) nations, and (5) super-nations.

Against his own background of studies in social anthropology, Mr.
MacCallum challenges many traditional assumptions and presents a
specific alternative grounded in both theory and practice. He foresees a
radically new form of society— new, at least, in the conceptual scope
which he outlines. It is a society of individual contracts— one that
transcends all geographical barriers to human relationships as well as the
shackles of prenatally determined bondage that we are fond of calling
citizenship. In an open society of contract, a person may deal with
whomever he chooses, relative to that which is his. Any two parties, near
or far, may contract with one another and do business on mutually
desired terms. The author explains how such a society is evolving as
individuals begin to perceive the method and put it into operation. Here
is a solution to the intrinsic violence of political power!

vii

viii

Mr. MacCallum has offered us an excellent bridge from the frontiers
of social theory to the specific practices that produce social harmony. He
avoids the common danger that such an attempt will become either an
impractical dream or only an unimaginative cataloguing of minutiae.
The construct he lays before us preserves private ownership and control
of property while establishing a method to provide desirable services
generally preempted by the State. He shows how we are already weaning
ourselves— often unconsciously— away from the political regimentation
of life, as well as from other forms of control based on coercion, without
leaving any vacuum of necessary functions to be performed.

The central concept of this book has endured all the growing pains
which revolutionary ideas must undergo. It was tested and refined by
exposure in earlier years, mostly through discussions which the author
had with his friends. In recent years the refined idea has begun to
command increasing attention as more and more "free communities"
spring up both here and abroad. It seems timely, therefore, to publish
this work and help along a concept which Harvard University's famous
Dean, Roscoe Pound, once praised as an "outstanding contribution to a
crucial problem of our time."

The author, like many of us who knew him, is anxious to give full credit
to his grandfather, Spencer Heath, whose inspiration and intellect
contributed much to making this book possible. Mr. Heath (1876—1963)
was one of the truly remarkable men of our time. Most persons knew him
as an engineer, an attorney, a manufacturer, or a horticulturist; but his
friends knew him also as a genial conversationalist and considered him
the keenest philosopher of freedom they had ever met.

Mr. MacCallum also acknowledges his indebtedness to many other
persons who, in various important ways, helped shape the ideas in this
book. But for the encouragement of Dr. James B. Watson of the
Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, this study
might not have been undertaken. Alvin Lowi, Jr., deserves credit for the
title, The Art of Community. A special note of thanks is due to Sartell
Prentice, Jr., of Pasadena, who was the final catalyst in this publication.

F. A. Harper

Author's Preface

The concept of proprietary community administration which is pivotal
to much of this book was original to my grandfather, Spencer Heath, and
was a principal theme of his final and major work. Citadel, Market and
Altar (1957). It has been my privilege to make use of many of the ideas
which he expressed in more general and philosophic form. In my studies
in anthropology I tested and extended some of them specifically to
primitive village organization, on the one hand, and to current develop-
ments in real estate— contemporary land tenure— on the other.

During periods of social evolution like the present, forms and
practices change rapidly. Specific facts and illustrations soon become
out-of-date, as may already be the case in some instances in this book
for which the work extends back over a decade. Essential principles of
human association do not change, however, and the reader is invited to
give these his attention. By progressively understanding the 'timeless
aspect,' our creative command grows.

In a field in which the relevant literature is still so little established as
in the social sciences, the amateur with scientific curiosity and sound
intuition suffers no great disadvantage. It is hoped, therefore, that the
present work will provide a stimulus to investigative thinking among
informed readers outside of the established social sciences no less than
within.

Spencer Heath MacCallum

San Pedro, California
May, 1970

ix

CONTENTS

Page

Foreword vii

Author's Preface ix
Chapter

1 IS THE HOTEL A COMMUNITY? 1

2 HISTORICAL BRIEFS 7

From Inns to Hotels 7

Shopping Centers 15

Industrial Estates 21

Mobile Home Parks 28

Some Other Forms 33

Conclusions 34

3 TRENDS IN THE REAL ESTATE INDUSTRY 39

4 NARROWING THE FIELD OF COMMUNITY
TYPES 49

5 STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION 55

The Pattern of Subdivision 55

The Economy of the Proprietary Community 59

Role of the Community Owner 63

6 COMPARISONS WITH PRIMITIVE COMMUNITY 68

7 THE NATURE OF COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION 75

The Proprietary Principle 76

Volunteer Association 79

What is Sovereignty? 85

Kinship 92

8 EVOLVING SOCIETY 95

Notes 107

Index 113

X

CHAPTER 1

Is the Hotel a Community?

At a time when we have entered the moon age, our communities on
earth are deteriorating faster than we can maintain them or escape from
them. The administrators of our communities are engaged in death
struggles with one another, drafting the occupants to do the fighting and
the dying, to the music and under the banners of the greater pubUc
welfare. This picture starkly portrays the failure of our social sciences.
The failure is only underscored by the spectacular successes in the
natural sciences.

Of the two main streams of social science effort, sociology and social
anthropology, the sociologists have concerned themselves historically
with what might be called clinical sociology, much as psychologists from
the time of Freud until quite recently have concentrated on clinical
psychology. Sociologists have dealt more with the ills and problems of
society than with its healthy functioning. Within their chosen field of
Western society, the very communities available for study have been
defective models of community functioning. Their pathology will be
explained in the course of this book. Social anthropologists, on the other
hand, have encountered much healthy functioning in the communities of
the primitive world. Yet, because of the enormous variety of social forms
and cultures, they have been wholly occupied in collecting and ordering
their data and have seen nothing to bridge to, have made no translations
or practical applications from primitive to modern society. Thus in the
social sciences there have been as yet none of the over-all integrations
and simplifications that have characterized the advances in the natural
sciences.

Recently, however, an interesting development has occurred which
parallels in some respects the history of the natural sciences. In the
Middle Ages, before there was any science of chemistry or physics, there
was nevertheless some very successful empirical chemistry and physics in
the arts of tanning and dyeing and metallurgy. In a like way, an
empirical art of community has developed within Western society since
mid-century, in a span of barely twenty years. It has appeared in the real-
estate field, outside of the cognizance of the social sciences and without
appreciation of its significance within the real-estate industry. Rudimen-
tary as it yet is, this empirical art may provide models of healthy social
functioning from which to infer much more than we know of the

2

The Art of Community

structure and function of communities and so move us closer to an
authentic natural science of society.

The task of this book is to explore this growing art of community and
some of its implications. An effective starting place is suggested by the
aphorism that all new understanding begins with a question. In this case
the line of inquiry actually did begin with a specific question that took
shape with great clarity in the writer's mind in the early spring of 1959.
The question was whether the hotel should not, in point of fact, be
considered a community and as valid an object of scientific study in
terms of structure and function as the communities of the Cherokee, the
Mambwe, or the Trukese, with which anthropologists are regularly
concerned, or as the communities of peasant and modern society.

True, there is little continuing personal contact among hotel guests, but
the transient and impersonal quahty of the hotel does not differ in
principle from that of modern cities and towns which are readily
acknowledged as communities. The physical analogy, moreover, is
striking. The hotel has its public and private areas, corridors for streets,
and a lobby for its town square. In the lobby is the municipal park with
its sculpture, fountains, and plantings. It has its shopping area, where
restaurants and retail stores bid for patronage. Its public transit system,
as it happens, operates vertically instead of horizontally.

Utilities, including power and water service and sewerage, are all
available. Police and fire protection come under the supervision of the
house officer and security staff. Some hotels provide chapels, sponsor
concerts and lectures, give adult instruction of various kinds, and conduct
nursery schools. Controlled lighting and climate and community-wide
credit arrangements number among the services and amenities which are
available only on the most rudimentary level in our out-of-doors
communities, yet which are accepted as a matter of course in hotels.

The question gains an element of interest in connection with the
organization of the hotel, for social scientists commonly suggest only
three possible bases of community organization, none of which applies to
a hotel. The suggested bases are kinship, recorded by anthropologists for
many primitive communities; common dedication to an ideal or purpose,
especially associated with religious communes; and sovereignty, with
which we are sufficiently familiar. The fragmented, transient character
of the guest population of a hotel precludes the formation of either
kinship ties or strong personal bonds or commitments. As for sover-
eignty, where is the taxation legislated and levied on the guests to finance
the common services? The authority of the management is proprietary
only and, as such, does not extend to the persons or property of the

Is the Hotel a Community?

3

guests, who individually negotiate with the management the amount and
method of payment and the services to be rendered in return.

The hotel, if considered to be a community, has some further interest-
ing attributes. It is a product of urban society and shares the impersonal
quality of the city; but its scale is small, it is clearly bounded, and it lacks
sovereignty, in common with a great many village communities. Thus it
tends to bridge— if it does not fall into— the gap between sociology and
anthropology.

By now the question has become more than a play on the meanings of
a word. It demands a considered answer, and the answer turns precisely
on the definition of community. The notion of community has long
haunted the thoughts of social scientists as a possible key to a unit of
social analysis that could be employed cross-culturally. Yet the concept
has been elusive. Seldom is more rigor attempted than to say that a
community consists of persons in social interaction within a geographical
area and having one or more additional common ties. This was the
synthetic definition offered in 1955 by sociologist George Hillery, who
collected ninety-four definitions of the word and made a statistical
analysis of their content. ' The word is also used figuratively, as when one
speaks of a "community of interest" or of a group of people who share a
common origin or likeness, as the Italian community in America.

Critical study of the hotel as a community, however, presented many
fresh aspects of the subject and suggested a definition that is cross-
culturally valid and has at the same time enough rigor to be a fruitful
analytic tool. In this book, therefore, community will be defined as an
occupation by two or more persons of a place divided into private and
common areas according to a system of relations which defines and allocates
responsibility for the performance of all activities that might be required for
its continuity.* Upkeep of the common area and its facilities, selection of
members, and leadership are prominent examples of these required
activities or tasks.

This definition has some surprising empirical consequences. It identi-
fies, in addition to what traditionally have been called communities, a
variety of phenomena not customarily thought of in that way. One, of

*Close personal ties are not a requirement of the definition, but neither are they excluded
by it. A community frequently provides the context, or the setting, for such ties. Common
usage is not analytical, however, and does not distinguish the two. Sociologist Conrad
Arensberg writes to the point: "The semantic confusion between community as organization
and 'community' as an individual's maximum range of face-to-face acquaintance, which
continues to appear in the literature of anthropology and social psychology, is a crippling
failure of sociological sense. It is in fact as if a zoologist should require of a beehive that it not
be one unless he knew every bee to brush wings with every other bee. " ^

4

The Art of Community

course, is the hotel. An office building in the daytime is also a community
by this definition; so is a theater during a performance, at which time the
seats are held privately, the aisles are used in common, and the chief
public service is entertainment. An apartment house and a trailer camp
also qualify. Even a restaurant qualifies; the tables and booths are the
restricted areas, and the music, decor, and availablity of food figure
prominently as common services. A private home, when more than one
of the family is in residence, is a community. Airplanes, ships, and trains
in transit meet the requirements of the definition.

Clearly this definition describes not an unchanging entity but, like
anything we may describe in the world around us, a conflux of condi-
tions, an event of which permanence is not a requirement. It has
reference to many diverse kinds of situations, but within those situations
it always denotes a certain set of conditions. The variables include
considerations of place, population, arrangement of internal space, kinds
of public service available, and arrangements for securing performance
of these services.

The function of a community within a larger community may also be a
significant variable, for normally we live in communities within commu-
nities—a booth within a restaurant within a building within a shopping
center within a town. In contemporary society, a person seldom finds
himself in only one community at one time. He passes from one
community to another a number of times during a day, occupying several
simultaneously on successive levels whose bounds usually can be de-
scribed with great clarity.

If the hotel is really a community, then is there a principle on which it
is organized as such? What are the social bonds that hold it together? The
answer is basically that the hotel is a community organized by contract.
But to give it a name is not to answer the question. It merely opens the
door to the inquiry. How the hotel is organized by contract will be dealt
with in later chapters.

The elaboration of business contract is a prominent and historically
recent development of Western civilization. It has assumed major
importance within the last two centuries as a way of relating impersonally
to others to accomplish personal wants by exchange of services.

Contract is commonly thought of as a relation between two individuals
only; seldom is it considered in a collective or community context except
figuratively, as in the political sense of Rousseau.*

*Against the prevailing ignorance of contract among most anthropologists and sociolo-
gists, it is interesting to observe that the British anthropologist, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, wrote
at one point, "I am proposing later to consider economic behavior as the conceivable unit
behavior of a social science."

Is the Hotel a Community?

5

Contract has proved to be an extremely productive technique for
individuals to employ in meeting such needs as food and clothing. But
when men think of providing environmental needs such as streets, parks,
and civic planning— needs they cannot enjoy separately but must share in
common— they habitually look to other means. The hotel proves to be an
exception. Here is an example of contract operating effectively in a
collective— a community— context.

Contract is the universal bond in hotel organization. Not only every
member of the service staff, but every guest is related to the whole
organization through its proprietors by contract. The manner of the
relationship of each toward others is specified in the terms of the
individual contracts, the sum of which at any time is the social charter or
constitution of the community.

It would be appropriate to call the hotel a proprietary community, since
it is a proprietary enterprise and the relations of every member of the
community are formed directly with the proprietary authority. The terms
of each contract, however, define the relations of each individual to every
other person in the community— the least obvious relationship being that
between one guest and another, since the special character of the hotel
requires that these relations be in the nature of what in anthropology are
called avoidance, or respect, relations. It is the nature of contracts that
their full terms are seldom, if ever, spelled out in writing. That would be
cumbersome. A contract is nothing more than an agreement, a meeting
of minds, and it is enough for such a purpose that much of it be
unwritten. This is particularly true of hotel guest contracts, since these
are usually short-term and highly standardized. Certain conventions of
behavior required in the hotel are no less contractual for not being
written.

However strange it may seem on first reflection, the hotel fulfills the
basic criteria for a community. Moreover, it is saved from being an
intellectual curiosity, an oddity of evolution or of semantics, by being in
such large and vitally growing company. All multiple-occupancy income
properties in real estate qualify as one or another form of proprietary
community.

The next two chapters provide some historical perspective from which
to examine the nature and potential of the proprietary community.

CHAPTER 2

Historical Briefs

Research into the nature of community hfe and organization tradi-
tionally has dealt with generalized or all-purpose communities. Proprie-
tary communities have not had the benefit of such study, partly because
they are recent but also because they comprise a broad class of special
purpose communities which lie outside the traditional scope of commu-
nity studies.

Proprietary communities are usually committed to special phases of
economic activity. Each of the functional divisions of the economy-
production, exchange, and consumption— has evolved its own specialized
forms: loft buildings and industrial parks to manufacturing, mart
buildings and shopping centers to exchange, and hotels and rental
housing developments to residential uses. Thus, proprietary communities
may be broadly classified according to purpose. Each form has developed
in its field independently of the basically similar developments occurring
in other fields. It remained for property managers, the newest branch of
real estate, to begin in a pragmatic way the conceptual task of unifying
the field.

The classification of a proprietary community according to its charac-
teristic activity has limited utility, however, for each displays a generaliz-
ing trend away from its original special-purpose character. Increasingly,
shopping centers which include oflfice buildings, hotel facilities, and
medical centers have become the commercial and cultural focal points of
suburbia. Industrial park developers are providing scientific research
facilities, professional buildings, shopping areas, and recreational
centers. There has also been a rapid rise in the number of planned real-
estate complexes that include all or various combinations of these
functions in one scheme of development.

Because little information is available on proprietary communities
outside of articles in the technical and trade media, most people have
only vague impressions of their history. This chapter summarizes the
development of four outstanding forms of proprietary community: the
hotel, the shopping center, the industrial estate, and the mobile-home
park.

From Inns to Hotels

The public hotel, as a commercial venture entered upon for profit, is
the oldest of the modern forms of proprietary community. But it is a far

8

The Art of Community

younger institution than most people suppose. From classical antiquity
until the industrial change in eighteenth-century England, there did exist
public inns managed for profit. But these were less than simply scaled-
down models of hotels as we know them. Not only was the hotel concept
of "service to the public" as a matter of deliberate policy unknown, but
the public inn had none of the social prestige the hotel has enjoyed in
recent times. Its nearest equivalent in today's society is the Skid Row
dormitory, for it largely housed society's castoffs, criminals, and the poor.
Nor does there seem to have been any better class of inns to balance the
picture, notwithstanding the importance of travel in every historical
period. There were other ways of providing accommodations, and
worthy people stopped at inns only when compelled by unfortunate
circumstances.

In the Mediterranean world, the rules of hospitality strongly prevailed.
A traveler stayed with family members, acquaintances, or the families of
professional and business associates, carrying letters or word of introduc-
tion in places where he was not known. Societies and brotherhoods
accommodated their own, while cities and states provided hospitality for
visitors on official business and sometimes maintained special post
stations for the use of their own couriers and emissaries en route.
Temples provided lodging for pilgrims and travelers. Later, during the
Middle Ages, nobles accommodated travelers in their- town houses and
country estates. Religious orders, both Moslem and Christian, cared for
travelers. Merchant and craft guilds provided accommodations for their
own traveling members.

The traveler to a city who stayed at a public inn was one who had no
family or other connections in the city and presumably no legitimate
business there. As such, he was widely suspect. Marco Polo reports that
the use of the guest register by innkeepers in Chinese cities was a
requirement of law, a police measure to monitor the movements of aliens
and unknown persons. It was also for the protection of such persons, for
the traveler without kin or connections was the natural prey of criminals.
This was another reason why the public inns attracted criminal elements
of every kind. One author writes that the public inns of Rome "... in
spite of a rather rigorous state supervision were noted for miserable
accommodations and bad reputations. In the vast majority of cases these
inns were nothing but bawdy houses and were frequented by gangs of
thieves recruited from all races."'

The guest register began as a police book in France in 1407. An earlier
law, enacted in France in 1315, had attempted to reduce assassinations
by making the innkeeper liable to the estate of any who died on his
premises. The liability was for three times the amount of property the

Historical Briefs

9

victim had been carrying. An easy alliance existed in those days between
the innkeeper and the highwayman.

As near to present time and culture as Colonial New England, the
innkeeper still had none of the modern ideas of service to his guests.
Following European custom, service beyond the minimal necessities was
reserved for "great folk" who were privileged by birth or station in life.
A traveler, merely as such, had no right to ask or demand any. Moreover,
the New England innkeeper was often held accountable by law for the
moral conduct of his guests. He had the prerogative of locking them in
the public stocks when he judged they deserved it, and it is clear from
accounts of the times that he took this responsibility seriously. The guest
in the public inn was still suspect. But times and circumstances were
changing.

The inn in America differed in several ways from its European
counterpart, and it prepared the way for the modern hotel, a thoroughly
American invention. Because of the exigencies of frontier life, the
American inn from the beginning was more of a public institution. Its
long hall was the only place to entertain, since at first there were no
homes corresponding to the Old World manor houses or outlying
residences with enough space to entertain privately on a large scale. Thus
the inn became the democratic center of community life, its role as a
place of lodging for travelers often being incidental to its role as a social
center for the town. Consequently, the American inn carried less stigma
than its European sisters. It developed further as the London inns on
which it was modeled began from the 1750's onward to improve and
achieve a reputation— small enough praise in that day— as the best
managed inns in the world.

Following the War of Independence, inns began to be built larger in
America. They became focal points of a flowering of civic and national
pride, and the diaries of more than one foreign traveler in the new
country reflect indignation at the independence of innkeepers who
showed little humility before their well-born guests.

In 1794 the City Hotel was built in New York. This was one of the first
uses of a new word, hotel, which came to mean a superior kind of an inn.
It was a word imported from France, where it meant simply a town hall
or large house under single administration. The City Hotel was the first
inn to be financed by a stock company, and it is said to have been the first
building in America built expressly for innkeeping purposes rather than
converted or enlarged from a private residence. Despite these qualifica-
tions, the City Hotel was still an inn, with traditional disregard for the
guest. But the gestation period had begun.

10

The Art of Community

The Nineteenth-Century Hotel

During the first quarter of the nineteenth century, a parade of
oversized inns were built in all the larger cities, culminating in a hotel
"fever" which broke out in America following the completion of the
Tremont House in Boston in 1829. This is regarded by hotelmen as the
true pioneer among hotels— not because of its size or facilities, but
because it pioneered what has come to be known in the industry as "hotel
service." For the first time a public inn, open to all who could pay,
formulated a conscious policy of guest service. Among its striking
innovations, the Tremont House offered as part of its regular policy a
separate room for each party who requested it. No longer were travelers
required to share rooms, and with each room went free soap and an
individual lock and key. Other innovations included a reading library,
which was free to guests, and a bath in the basement, which guests could
patronize instead of going outside to a public bathhouse.

The hotel-building competition of the next fifty years manifested the
braggadocio spirit of young America. It engendered an excitement that
was equaled only by the building of the canals and the railroads. It was
the first of a series of "firsts" in the new order of American life. As one
author writes, "Every city and town in the country had to have a hotel as
fine as the Tremont House, and sooner or later they got it." Unrivaled by
a comparable development anywhere in the world, American hotels of
that period caught and held the public imagination as did the sky-
scrapers of a later generation.

This rapid development of hotels could not be justified in economic
terms alone. For the most part they did not pay, or they paid less than
comparable. investments in other enterprises. Many were built by public
subscription promoted by local pride and hope of drawing new popula-
tion and business to the growing community. But much of the popular
enthusiasm must also be ascribed to nationalistic spirit and pride in the
new Republic. America vaunted its freedom and equality of opportunity,
its democracy, its ban on class distinctions, and its belief in the worth and
dignity of the individual. It rejected hereditary class privileges and
hailed the new era of the common man. The current saying in America
was that every man was a king. And as kings have palaces, so did every
American. The new hotels appearing on every hand, each open alike to
all on equal terms, and each more grand than the one before, were
acclaimed as the "palaces of the people." Hence the popular name from
the period, "Palace Hotel."

In the years following the Civil War, a subtle change took place. The
public imagination was caught up in new wonders, and the new class of

Historical Briefs

11

millionaires began to make the hotels their own palaces, setting them-
selves apart from the mainstream of Americans by wholesale importa-
tion of European titles and trappings of privilege. Hotels became
symbolic of class distinctions, the very idea they had flaunted the
generation before. In an engaging book. The American Hotel, an
Anecdotal History, Jefferson Williamson suggests this change and the
transition to it in his choice of names to distinguish three main periods in
the nineteenth-century development of the hotel: The Palace Hotel, The
Bowl and Pitcher Period, and The Grand Hotel. The grand hotel lost some
of the public rapport of preceding decades, as hotels came to be built as
much for monuments to individuals and to the collective vanity of a new
American "elite" as for local community pride. Finally, when their
rapport was at lowest ebb, hotels became a prominent target of the
temperance movement.

The period of the grand hotel extended into the twentieth century,
preserving outdated business methods and uneconomical building design
long after other businesses had begun to convert to cost accounting and
modern business management. Hotels throughout the period had been
monuments, entrepreneured for almost any motive but that of imper-
sonal business. The inflationary years of the 1920's disguised the hollow
economic base of the industry and tolerated its greatest building boom.
But during the Great Depression that followed 1929, the centennial of
the opening of the Tremont House, eighty-five percent of the hotels in
the United States went into bankruptcy, many of them two and three
times over before business began its upturn again.

The Modern Hotel

"E. M. Statler invented the modern hotel as surely as Henry Ford
invented the modern automobile." With these words, one author
introduces the Buff"alo Statler, built in 1908. Even during the last years of
the monument hotels, a quiet change was taking place— a purely eco-
nomic development in response to changing needs and times. Ellsworth
M. Statler was building hotels that were somewhat unesthetic but
carefully studied for economy of operation. He standardized operations
and carried research into every phase of the hotel business. He and
others experimented with the chain organization concept which had
already appeared in Germany. These developments continued to grow—
and they survived the Great Depression. When hotels began to be built
once more in the late 1940's, they were no longer fashioned in the image
of the monument hotel.

The new hotel industry is characterized, instead, by chain and fran-
chise operation, thorough management training, up-to-date cost-ac-

12

The Art of Community

counting techniques, increasing use of automation, and research in all
phases of hotel administration. It has undergone a change in structural
forms that amounts almost to a revolution in building design.

Revolution in Forms

Any account of the purely formal changes in inns and hotels from
early times must begin with the functional distinction between wayside
and terminal accommodations. The first is patronized mainly by the
traveler who is en route and needs only overnight lodging. Its clientele is
transitory by comparison with those using terminal accommodations,
which serve the traveler at his destination. The average length of a
terminal stay is several days (omitting the residential hotel, which may
serve transients incidentally but functions primarily as an apartment
house). The two kinds of operation are represented in their purest forms
by the wayside motel and the metropolitan city hotel.

Both wayside and terminal functions are very old. To say which
function evolved earlier is difficult, since each largely complements the
other. Wayside accommodations may have evolved earliest as a distinc-
tive architectural form, however, because of their more specialized
requirements and the fact that terminal accommodations could be
adapted from existing dwellings. Wayside accommodations early
evolved the widespread form of the Near-East caravanserai, the essential
function of which was to give protection and shelter to a party of
travelers and their animals. This form was basically a circular, walled
enclosure that could be barricaded at night— the center of the enclosed
space for animals and baggage, and the shelter around the inner
perimeter of the walls, facing the court, for the travelers and drivers. This
was the form of night camp and defense adopted by American wagon
trains a century ago, closing the wagons in a protective circle. As a
natural defensive position, it has probably always been used by bands
traveling in open and potentially hostile country.

Until recent times, there was little improvement in either kind of
accommodation. The first improvements were made in terminal accom-
modations in England shortly before 1750. By 1800, London inns were
reputed to be the best in the world. But at this point their progress
stopped, relative to events in the New World. The English wayside
accommodations, in the meantime, had not shared the general improve-
ment of the London inns. But their time came, about 1815, when the
building of macadam roads and the advent of the stagecoach gave
impetus to the development of wayside inns in England and America.
This inaugurated the shortlived era of the English coaching inn. Almost
as suddenly, this growth of wayside accommodations, famed (and

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13

fabled) in Pickwickian literature, ceased. For a century, it yielded to the
railroads, which lessened the time spent in travel between cities and
towns and gradually offered all refreshment and dining facilities and
eventually even sleeping accommodations on board the "iron horse"
itself, making it unnecessary to stop en route except briefly to let
passengers off and on. The trains themselves took over the functions of
the stagecoach and the wayside inn.

During this century of development and expansion of terminal
accomodations, each decade witnessed an increase in the numbers and
kinds of travelers. Who were the people who stopped at public hotels?
During the mid- 1 800 's, drummers formed the largest traveling group. A
newspaper poet of the 1870's sang,^

Who puts up at der besht hotel,
Und dakes his oysters on der shell,
Und mit der frauleins cuts a schwell?

Der drummer.

Then acting troupes joined in the travel and became an important class
of guests— whole companies of "barnstormers" instead of just the
leading actors, who previously had toured alone. The last decades saw the
"emancipated new women" join the complement of travelers. Travel
gradually became more democratic until in the twentieth century not
only women, but engineers and other professional people and then
f amily groups, swelled the traveling population.

The most dramatic post-World War I development in America
occurred in the 1920's when the automobile came into general use.
Suddenly the traveling public, which by now included every segment of
the population, gave up trains and poured into the country in automo-
biles. In the first years, no facilities were available in adequate numbers.
Private homes were pressed into service, and "Tourists" and "Guest
Home" signs became a common sight along wayside America.

This change prepared the way for a major readjustment in the hotel
industry. The new conditions called for the development of that long
neglected branch of hotel operation, the wayside accommodation.
Traditional hotelmen at first would not recognize motels as part of their
industry. State hotel associations resisted extending membership to motel
owners until the end of the 1950's.

The motel form did not stabilize immediately. A new phenomenon
entered the picture with the growth of the suburbs, where motels
increasingly served community functions and the division between

14

The Art of Community

wayside and terminal accommodations was ambiguous. Motels also
moved into the town proper, where they adopted more complete hotel
service and, consequently, competed successfully with small hotels of
less than 300 rooms. Hotels in turn modified their construction along
motel lines and, except for the largest, moved out from downtown.
These hybrid forms, intermediate between hotels and motels, or
between terminal and wayside accommodations, gradually came to be
called "inns."

In the meantime, the large metropolitan hotels of over a thousand
rooms underwent a revolution of their own after World War II to
accommodate automobiles, which had replaced trains as the dominant
mode of travel, and to meet the demand for more convenience and less
formal service. Today few large hotels are built as separate, free-
standing structures. The trend is to combine downtown hotel accommo-
dations with office space and shopping facilities in large architectural
complexes, aiming at a more balanced and complementary use of land. It
is coming to be recognized that the hotel business is really a group of
related businesses under one management. The enterprise is still domi-
nated, as a rule, by the room business, but less than before.

Thus the hotel, whose past history could be described clearly in terms
of the dual functions of wayside and terminal accommodations, has
undergone a revolution of form. For the past century and a half, its
development was affected strongly by changes in the technology of
transportation. The stagecoach opened up roads and brought about a
brief development of wayside innkeeping. But this lapsed during a
century dominated by rail transportation, a century in which the
traveling public grew to include virtually the whole population. Then the
automobile reopened the countryside to road travel, and wayside
hotelkeeping came strongly into its own. Today air travel is opening up
resort hotels in hitherto inaccessible parts of the world. The development
of suburbs is partially obscuring the old twofold distinction between
terminal and wayside accommodations, and the metropolitan hotel is
becoming an integral part of larger land-use complexes.

Historical Briefs

15

Shopping Centers

For the first time, private enterprise has taken the initiative in creating a
new human environment, new towns consisting mostly of stores and shops,
but with ever-growing emphasis on the social and cultural functions of this
new meeting ground for millions of people.

Victor Gruen
Women's Wear Dai ly^

A shopping center is "a market place, consisting of a group of
commercial establishments planned and developed as a unit with the real
estate phase of its operation under the direction of a single landlord.""
Its history is shorter and somewhat different than the hotel. Of the 12,500
shopping centers in the United States and Canada today, less than 100
were in operation before 1950, and not twenty before World War II. The
story of shopping centers begins with the story of residential
subdivisions.

Shortly after the turn of the century, a handful of land developers
including, among others, Edward H. Bouton of Baltimore, Jesse Clyde
Nichols of Kansas City, Hugh Potter of Houston, and Hugh Prather of
Dallas, found a common accord in their enthusiasm for the profit
opportunities afforded by good land planning in subdivisions. Among
the principles developed by these men was the thought that, if
commercial land uses could be clustered and provided with a degree of
orderly development instead of being strung out haphazardly, the value
of both residential and commercial property would be protected, and
blight and eventual deterioration of the whole area might be avoided.
Convenient and attractive shopping facilitites would enhance
residential values, while good residential development nearby would
boost commercial values.

In his Roland Park development in Baltimore in 1907, Bouton is
credited with the first shopping center— a group of stores set back from
the street to provide convenient parking and unified in their architectural
treatment. For half a century as the shopping center evolved its most
efficient form, it was associated with residential housing projects. A
dozen or so early examples, begun for the most part in the 1920's, include
the Janss Brothers' Westwood Village in Los Angeles, Nichol's Country
Club Plaza in Kansas City, Potter's River Oaks Shopping Center in
Houston, Prather's Highland Park Shopping Village in Dallas, and the
Shaker Heights Shopping Center in Cleveland.

The break with the convention of store-front window displays facing
the street occurred at this time. This usage, long fixed in retailing

16

The Art of Community

tradition, was no longer functional in quite the same way where most
shoppers passed by or arrived in cars. The community of shops turned
their backs on the adjacent street and faced in upon an open mall, a self-
contained cluster surrounded on all sides by expanse of parking lot.

Meantime, an independent series of events had been taking place,
events which proved to be significant for the development of "regional"
shopping centers. In the 1920's, department stores and large mail order
firms such as Sears, Roebuck and Company and Montgomery Ward
found it profitable to locate branch outlets, sometimes in conjunction
with a warehouse, in outlying locations having ample parking for
shoppers who arrived by car. Reinforcing this trend was the parallel
development of chain grocery stores with adjacent off-street parking,
forerunners of the supermarkets.

Thus experience accumulated. Construction of new centers was de-
pressed during the 1930's. It picked up briefly in the early 1940's, only to
be interrupted by World War II. After the war, however, shopping
centers appeared overnight in every part of the country as small home
construction, spurred by public subsidies under Federal Housing Admin-
istration and Veterans' Administration legislation, swelled to unexpected
tides and etched the first lines of the new "suburbia."

In the spring of 1950, with the opening of Northgate, in Seattle, the
main trunk of shopping center development branched. A new type, the
"regional" center, appeared. Hitherto, centers had served housing
projects and neighborhoods. They had stocked convenience goods, such
as food, housewares, drugs, and cosmetics, purchased at more or less
frequent intervals and with a minimum of comparison shopping.
Shoppers' goods, consisting of items such as furniture, clothing, and
heavy appliances, were sold in the downtown stores.

The new regional centers— first Northgate, then Shoppers' World near
Boston and Northland in Detroit— set out deliberately to reproduce the
facilities of a downtown business district. They no longer depended on a
single area of nearby homes but drew customers from as far away as
thirty and even forty minutes driving time. This required one or several
major department stores and a careful balance of tenants to achieve
maximum "cumulative pull." It required a combination of vigorously
competing stores to provide the comparison shopping found in down-
town shopping districts. Architectural Forum commented at the time.

The need to provide an equivalent of the comparative shopping possible
downtown means planning for competition. This term, which only yesterday
would have been considered self-contradictory, may point to a strong new
strand in the American economic fabric.

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17

James B. Douglas, Northgate's manager, worded a rule in the 1950's
that was widely repeated as the Noah's Ark Principle: "In a regional
center follow the Noah's Ark idea, have two of everything." Today his
rule is obsolete; two are inadequate.

The shopping center, because of its newness, is still not well under-
stood. The major problems which beset it are in a real sense growing
pains. The decade of the 1950's was less a search for physical form than
for principles of management and operation. This search for social
organization became the major emphasis of the 1960's and will continue
in the 1970's.

At first, it was thought that the development of a shopping center
entailed no more than building the physical facilities and leasing them.
The role of the owner or his representative in the on-going, daily
management of the shopping center was underestimated or even over-
looked. There had yet to develop in the shopping center field a concept
equivalent to that of "hotel service" which marked the line of departure
from the inn to the hotel in the nineteenth century. The major postwar
event besides the introduction of the regional center was to be the
development of service-oriented center management— a management
oriented toward serving the tenants in the same way that they in turn
were oriented toward serving their customers.

Paralleling the evolution of management has been the growth of
merchants' associations. Although seemingly separate, the two have
unfolded together, for the success of the merchants' association depends
on management providing leadership.* As Northgate's Douglas again
put it, "the shopping center developer is in an ideal position to act as a
catalyst in bringing all his tenants together into a hard-hitting promo-
tional team."' The Urban Land Institute also counsels:

Experience indicates that the organization and operation of the association
should be left to the merchants but that the owner must participate. Without
the active and energetic assistance of the owner in stimulating interest,
originating and launching promotions, preparing budgets, and coordinating
all activities, there will be no active association.

Merchants' associations were formed for a different purpose than they
now mainly fulfill. In order to make rents as low as possible for

*In twelve case studies of merchants' associations reported by Richard Nelson, ' two had
insufficient exfjerience on which to base an opinion. Of the remaining ten, four suffered
because the owner exercised either too little leadership (two cases) or "too much" (two cases).
None was free of difficulties. Diagnoses of the remaining six had to do with insufficient
membership (one case), insufficient program (two cases), disagreement over assessments
(one case), and insufficient organization (one case). All of these deficiencies reflect
inadequate leadership which could have been remedied by the owner.

18

The Art of Community

merchants who had still to be sold on the idea of shopping centers,
developers after World War II separated many costs of maintenance
from the quoted rent and commonly left some housekeeping and
maintenance problems of the center to the tenants. Merchants' associa-
tions were formed in part to meet these common needs. The question of
joint promotion to supplement individual advertising very soon arose
and was recognized as chiefly an association function.

Gradually the realization grew that the possibility of real group action
under effective leadership was one of the great strengths of the shopping
center idea and that the importance of merchants' associations lay in the
development of eff'ective joint promotions. Today it is accepted that
merchants' associations are essential to successful shopping center
operation. The housekeeping functions of the center are more and more
being assumed by the management directly in order to reduce their costs
and to permit the retailer to concentrate on the job of merchandising.

The newness of the shopping center operation was evident also in the
area of finance and tenant selection. Because of the absence of informa-
tion about the investment characteristics of shopping centers, lenders
found it necessary to rely on the credit ratings of the tenants. They
preferred major chains with AAA-1 ratings and often refused to finance
centers where less than sixty per cent of the leases were with chain
merchants. Developers soon learned, however, that many local mer-
chants were easier to work with, had better local followings than many
chains, and supported the association more readily. The developer who
had to find outside financing thus was limited in his ability to choose
tenants for what he considered to be in the long-term interest of the
center.

This limitation on the developer's ability to select his tenants also
embarrassed him in lease negotiations by the added bargaining power it
gave to prospective "key" tenants. Concessions asked and won took the
form of "exclusives" on certain lines of merchandise, low percentage
rents, or percentages without minimum. Thus additional leverage was
added to the already strong bargaining position of the larger tenants and
especially the department stores— strong because of their heavy pulling
power which substantially contributed to the success of all the merchants
in the center. It became common practice for key tenants to be carried at
cost or even be subsidized, and for the developer to attempt to make up
the diff'erence by charging higher rents to the other tenants.

The eff'ective use of leasing as a tool of shopping center operation was
slow to develop, although it received as much attention, perhaps, as any
other factor. This was due in part to the fact that shopping centers were

Historical Briefs

19

not always developed by experienced real estate people, and in part to
the limitations on tenant selection imposed by lenders. It was also partly
due to the failure of developers to recognize at the negotiating table the
full potential value of what they had to offer, and to their failure, through
inadequate management, to achieve that potential value. While shop-
ping centers proved to be successful for their merchant tenants, they were
slow to live up to the expectations of their owners and backers.

The importance of both of these aspects of shopping center manage-
ment—effective leadership and skillful leasing— led to a disagreement,
recurrent in the trade media, about the fundamental nature of a
shopping center. Some held that a shopping center essentially was a
merchandising operation and should be sponsored by merchants— men
familiar with promotion and able to work closely and continuously on
behalf of the tenants. Others held that a center essentially was a real
estate proposition and should be promoted by people experienced in real
estate.

Shopping center operation has little in common with land brokerage or
speculation, the traditional supports of the real estate business. It has
everything to do, however, with property management, that youngest
branch of the real estate business which promises to become the most
important. With the exception of hotel administration, professional
property management is little developed. Shopping center management,
in turn, is among the youngest divisions of this new field; yet it requires
skill and specialization surpassing that of the management of the most
complex hotel. It is basically a question of community management,
requiring the continuous coordination of many private interests, a new
function for real estate.

The question of the nature of shopping center management, whether it
is basically a merchandising or a real estate venture, had relevance
therefore to the practical question of who would sponsor shopping
centers.

Department stores, recognizing that the superior drawing power of
their stores was a heavily contributing factor in the success of a center,
felt that they would probably be smart to cut out independent manage-
ment altogether and to assume the management functions themselves,
either directly or through a subsidiary corporation, thereby enjoying the
whole benefit of the increase in surrounding land values for which their
store was responsible. This argument, however, underestimated both the
specialized requirements of center operation and the collective impor-
tance of smaller stores. Some department stores soon found center
administration to be too demanding of their staffs' time, and ownership
of real estate to be a commitment of capital that they were specialized to

20

The Art of Community

use more productively in other Unes. Furthermore, some found incom-
patibilities between their role as dominant tenant and that of the
manager who must represent the center as a whole.

An underlying temptation, moreover, where a center is sponsored by a
dominant store is to allow the rest of the center to become merely a
subsidized or break-even operation to set off the sponsoring store.

Nevertheless, some of the most successful regional centers were
sponsored by department stores. After about 1956, chain stores began to
build and operate small neighborhood and community shopping centers.
Sponsorship by a leading tenant had certain advantages at this early
stage of shopping center know-how. First, a leading store thoroughly
understood merchandising and was often more than able to balance its
conflict of role interest by providing a measure of positive leadership
and participation in the life of the center that still was not enough
emphasized by shopping-center management generally. Secondly, de-
partment store and chain organizations did not have to look for outside
financing. They were able, therefore, to develop a center according to
their own best knowledge of the situation. Their financial independence
gave them an important freedom in tenant selection where independent
developers often were required to balance the long-term interests of the
center against the chain store leases they needed in order to get
financing. Finally, they could afford to move leisurely toward the
completion of their leases, which further enhanced their bargaining
position.

Thus, sponsorship of centers by a major tenant, despite its inherent
weakness, was helped by considerable strengths in both phases of
management, the traditional real estate functions of finance and leasing,
and the developing role of leadership. The debate will eventually
diminish as more knowledge of the income characteristics of shopping
centers becomes available to the financial world and as the leadership
role of shopping center management becomes better understood and
performed.

The signs are encouraging. Before 1955, the extensive trade literature
on shopping centers dealt almost entirely with matters of location
analysis, physical layout, and traffic pattern. As principles have been
found for resolving the initial problems of physical form, and as centers
more and more begin to be concerned with operation instead of with
planning and building alone, the literature of shopping centers reflects
an increasing trend of thought toward matters of social organization, the
activities and organization of merchants' associations, and the all-
important role of management.

Historical Briefs

21

Industrial Estates

Is it possible to conceive of these industrial districts fifty years hence as little
islands of heaven, where the property owner has practical self-restraint and
self-enforcement superior to the standard of public morality generally
prevalent?

Ronald Wank
Architectural Forum

When financier Marshall Stevens conceived and built the ship canal
that "brought the sea up to Manchester" before the close of the
nineteenth century, he expected that cotton would thereafter be diverted
from Liverpool through Manchester, making a paying proposition of the
canal. But the cotton did not flow, and the canal remained empty of
traflSc. The cotton millers had formed ties by marriage with the cotton
shippers of Liverpool, and these bonds were sufficient to prevent the
cotton traffic from quitting its customary ways. Searching how to save the
canal investment, Marshall Stevens hit on the idea of preparing a large
tract of land in Manchester for industrial use, laying in streets and
supplying the sites with utilities and services designed to facilitate
industry, then inviting manufacturers to lease sites there— a community
of industries whose freight on the canal would, in time, recover his
combined investment. Thus was built Trafford Park, England's first
industrial estate. The year was 1896.

Stevens' venture succeeded. Others, such as the Slough Trading Estate,
near London (1920), followed the pioneering example of Trafford Park.
A Government program for "depressed areas" after 1936 ironically
brought to an end the private development of industrial estates in
England.

In the United States, somewhat similar developments started in
Chicago and Kansas City: The Clearing Industrial and Central Manu-
facturing Districts in Chicago in 1899 and 1905, and the North Kansas
City Industrial District in 1900. Industry City, a part of Bush Terminal in
New York, also began in 1905. The number of these experiments in
industrial plant location remained small for nearly half a century. As late
as 1947 there were few planned industrial districts of any note. Subse-
quently their growth pattern paralleled that of shopping centers, with
rapid development starting in the late 1940's. In 1969, they numbered
approximately 3,500, over ninety per cent of them established after
1950. They vary greatly in size, the largest being those that have been
established longest.

Unlike other examples of proprietary communities, such as hotels,
shopping centers, and mobile-home parks, industrial estates are a British

22

The Art of Community

invention. The variant that grew up in the United States, known since
about 1950 as the "industrial park," is only now beginning to experiment
with the leasehold land policy that characterized the industrial estates
from their inception. The industrial park idea is based on speculative
land subdivision rather than on property management as an on-going
business.

The industrial park consists of "a tract of land subdivided and
developed according to a comprehensive plan for the use of a community
of industries."'" The industrial estate, on the other hand, is specifically
defined as "a large tract of land that has been developed in accordance
with master plans to accommodate industry and which has been sub-
jected to overall and continuous control under a leasehold system of
tenure."" Thus, the industrial park developer has traditionally empha-
sized sales. While he has also leased in order to accommodate either
market preference, he has looked forward to selling off all the sites
eventually and concluding his interest in the area.

Until all or nearly all of the sites in an industrial park are sold, the
developing organization normally holds title to the streets and common
areas, dedicating these to the city or to an association of the property
owners for further maintenance only when it no longer has an interest in
the subdivision. But because of the policy of leasing sites when this is
preferred by the prospective occupant, only a small number of industrial
park subdivisions have in fact ever been entirely sold off, and the
developing organization in most cases has continued to exercise an active
interest in the district to protect and improve its investment in the unsold
sites. Many developers who began with short-term expectations have
found themselves with a continuing long-term interest in the
subdivision.*

The English industrial estates followed a leasehold policy in order to
maintain a unified land authority, thus providing flexibility for a gradual
and continuing adjustment of the land-use pattern to changing condi-
tions as sites reverted or leases came up for renewal. The differing
practice in American industrial parks may be due to the prevailing
emphasis placed in this country on "turning over" land as the way to
profit from real estate. The opening up of new land in the West helped
establish land subdivision and speculation as the American pattern.

*W. N. Mitchell and M. J. Jucius noted this effect as early as 1933: "Though undoubtedly
it was the intention of the originators of the districts that they should be self-liquidating,
experience has shown that such a possibility is at best a remote one on account of the
pronounced preference on the part of many industries to lease rather than buy plant sites."
Some parks which have not leased, however, such as Airlawn in Dallas, which opened in
1938, have sold out their subdivisions altogether.

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23

Industrial parks, or organized industrial districts as they are sometimes
called, have been criticized by Gilbert Hardman for their failure to
devise a land policy:

The fact that these estates are under leasehold control is one of the prime
differences between an industrial estate and an organized industrial district.
We feel that it is only under such a system that it is possible to insure that the
standards of an industrial estate are maintained after it has once been
developed. It is, of course, true that you can set restrictive convenants on land
in an organized industrial area which is developed for sale but, in practice,
these restrictions are difficult to enforce and, besides, the developer usually
loses interest once he has disposed of the majority of properties in the area
and then it falls to the Municipality to subject the area to its usual planning
controls. Under leasehold control, however, the landlord is vitally interested
in the future of the estate and in the maintenance of property values there. He
also has the power to enforce his restrictions through the covenants of the
leases. '

In the absence of any policy for perpetual management of the district
by the original developer, one of the chief concerns in industrial
subdivisions has been the problem of how to assure continuing and firm,
yet at the same time flexible, land controls in the district. Some progress
has been accomplished in this direction by means of private covenants in
deeds, especially with the gradual substitution of density and perform-
ance standards for prohibitions on specific land uses.* The success in
industrial subdivisions to date, however, is attributable also to the
original screening of occupants for compatibility by developers at the
time when their land interest was still intact, as well as to their continuing
interest in many subdivisions, as previously noted. The importance of
strict land control is verified by James Lee and Gilbert Wong:

Restrictions on the character of industry and facilities permitted in an
industrial district are among the most critical aspects of district development.
A direct relationship has been noted between the extent of restrictions and a
district's success; this relationship results from the degree of attraction that a
properly restricted district holds for industrial occupants. The restrictions
insure compatibility among occupants, and between the district and its
neighbors in the community. Because of restrictions, property usage is
predictable and property values are protected.

The difficulties with restrictive covenants in deeds, however, have been
their inflexibility, once established, and the problem of enforcing them.
As Richard Murphy and William Baldwin have noted, "Some provision

*ExcIusions of specific industries considered to be incompatible with other contemplated
land uses at the time the restrictions are made become dysfunctional in the wake of
technological change. Performance standards, on the other hand, regulate such measurable
effects as "noise, smoke and other particulate matter, vibration, noxions, gases, odors, glare
and heat, fire and explosive hazards, traffic and waste disposal."

24

The Art of Community

must be made for continuing management to enforce private restric-
tions, to approve the admission of new tenants, and to modify any
portions of the restrictive covenants which become unnecessary or
unduly burdensome in the course of time."" Where such provision is not
made, location in an industrial park loses some of its appeal. Witness the
plaint of an industrialist:

Living in a park community, as in any community, adds a set of community
relations problems to the ordinary burdens of management. Deed restrictions
and their continuing adjustment undoubtedly limit its flexibility inherent in
some independent locations; the needs and aims of the business may change
but the restrictions go on. Room for expansion is Umited by the closeness of
neighbors; it may often be relatively more expensive to provide for
expansion in a developed park than by the acquisition of idle land adjoining
an independently located plant. '

Experimentation with associations has yielded some fair success in this
direction, at least for the time being. High standards reportedly have
been maintained in both the 65th Street and the Addison Districts in
Chicago, where all sites were sold and the control was passed to
associations in 1920 and 1946, respectively. How permanent this solution
may be in the absence of continued interest on the part of the developer
is still a question, especially as replanning becomes necessary or if some
disagreement arises among the owners.

A third and, in the long term, perhaps a more serious weakness of
private covenants as a means of land control is that they offer no way in
the future of altering the basic land-use pattern, made rigid by divided
ownerships, as needs and concepts of planning and land-use change.
Land economist Richard Ratcliff, in his classic text. Urban Land
Economics, observes of residential subdivision, "once the lots have been
sold off into individual ownership, even a few of them, replanning and
resubdividing become virtually impracticable."'*

This is a difficulty that has not been widely encountered as yet because
of the newness of planned industrial districts. Furthermore, because of
the speculative and hence short-term aspect of the subdivision operation,
it is to the interest of the subdivider to ignore it. To call attention to it
would be to call attention to defects in the product, defects which he feels
powerless to remedy. It would be "knocking the merchandise." Realtors,
therefore, have paid scant attention to this very fundamental aspect of
land planning.

There is at present, however, a tendency to experiment with lease-only
policies in some of the newer developments. Examples are Roosevelt
Field Industrial District in New York, Sunshine State Industrial Park in

Historical Briefs

25

Florida, Stanford Industrial Park in California, and some Canadian
developments in the line of the British industrial estates such as Annacis
Island, British Columbia. We may expect this to become the prevailing
trend for reasons that will be developed in the next chapter.

Since industrial parks are not as widely known as hotels and shopping
centers, which involve the public directly, it may be desirable to discuss
some of the kinds of services they offer their tenants.

The developer of an industrial park assembles the tract, obtains
appropriate zoning, and plans and improves the land by grading,
providing water supply, sewage disposal and surface drainage facilities,
laying in streets and curbing, installing industrial utilities and rail leads,
and landscaping the sites. The fully developed district offers a full range
of services including architectural, engineering, and construction serv-
ices, building and ground maintenance, construction financing, publicity
assistance, warehousing and trucking, banking, restaurants, medical and
club facilities, and district police and fire protection. The developer may
offer prospective customers a "package plan" similar to the one de-
scribed for Bergen County Industrial Terminal, New Jersey:

The package plan for occupants of the terminal comprises full service, with
respect to plant layout, building design, taking of competitive bids, awarding
of contracts, supervision of construction, and arranging for financing of
ownership or lease. The service also includes full consideration of the
prospect's tax situation, labor problems, shipping and mailing requirements,
and utility needs. The company engages its architects and engineers on
contract."

An important function of the developer is to handle negotiations with
government agencies on behalf of the tenants. The developer also
establishes the policies for maintenance of the district and encourages
the formation of a district association to study special problems such as
traffic, taxation, and employment, and other problems relating to the
district and to industry in general. He prepares the occupants to assume
eventually full responsibility through the association for the mainte-
nance of the district and for the administration of the restrictive
covenants on the land.

Many services in the district need not be supplied directly by the
developing organization. They may be secured indirectly by means of a
selective admissions policy that is designed to bring about a pattern of
compatible and, especially, complementary land uses in the district. Firms
that specialize in the services required by other industries are encouraged
to locate in the development. These include such operations as warehous-

Propledod is lo Eibliofeco
UMiVEftSlDAD FRANCISCO MARROQUIN

26

The Art of Community

ing and trucking, electronic data processing centers, sales and sample
display centers, vocational technical schools, research firms, recreation,
hotel and restaurant facilities, banking, and medical and professional
services of many kinds.

A district management may provide many miscellaneous services, as in
the Clearing District, Chicago:

To assure rapid construction, the District carries in stock a large inventory of
fabricated steel and lumber— a bit of forethought which has often saved
months of time on building projects, particularly during periods of critical
material shortages. . . . Building materials adequate to erect a 200,000-
square-foot building are stocked at all times.

A special attraction of park location for small firms is that it enables
them to compete on a better footing with larger and better established
companies. An article in Industrial Development makes the point as
follows:

The essence of the competition between small and large companies is not
markets, not money, not production facilities. It is management efficiency.

This is revealed in the area of management controls and organization. One
way in which managements of smaller businesses are achieving these controls
is by taking advantage of electronic data processing 'through the use of
centers where programming talent and computing machine time can be
bought on an hourly basis. . . . Handling the payroll for the combined park
membership, the center can save each firm up to 33 per cent in payroll-
handling costs. ■

Leasing instead of owning their realty enables small companies with
limited borrowing power to use their capital directly in their business and
still compete for the best talent, since a park location gives them the
added attraction of optimum working conditions. All of the better parks
enable tenants to make available to their employees in some degree
recreational facilities such as swimming pools, bowling alleys, ball fields,
recreational rooms, canteens, and beauty parlors.

Murphy and Baldwin, in the article cited earlier, see in these joint
economies a great potential for the future development of industrial
parks:

The industrial park of the future . . . need not be confined to the kinds of
organizations that now use it— offices, research establishments, light to
medium manufacturers, assembly plants, and distribution centers. It is
conceivable, for example, that a park management could provide control
facilities that would make a group of chemical manufacturing plants
compatible with other kinds of industry or even with a commercial or

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27

residential environment, although the cost of such facilities would be
prohibitive to any individual plant. There may be significant joint economies
in such things as waste disposal and smoke control. "

Such common facilities presuppose a continuing managerial interest.

The management of an industrial district, like that of a hotel or a
shopping center, is complex. The single object of the owner, the one
purpose that brings order into such a many-sided operation, is to
increase rents and sales by making the sites attractive places in which to do
business. This is explicitly stated by an officer of Chicago's Clearing
Industrial District: "Our only interest is in enhancing the value of our
land and buildings through the creation of a favorable industrial
atmosphere.""

The last point that should be made in this sketch of planned industrial
districts is that, like Trafford Park, they began for the most part as
attempts to increase the profitability of other and quite different
enterprises, rather than as projects developed on their own merits. The
main sponsors of planned industrial districts in the United States before
the 1940's were railroads. Their primary interest was to locate industry
along their tracks in order to increase freight traffic. Such districts were
set up at cost and were not planned for entrepreneurial profit. The
continuing importance of such operations is indicated by a statement in
the 1968 Annual Report of the Penn Central Railroad: "Our industrial
development department assisted in the location or expansion of 567
manufacturing plants in 301 communities on Penn Central lines during
1968. These plants are expected to produce annual revenues for Penn
Central of $39.4 million from more than 171,000 carloads of freight."
Nevertheless, a railroad official writes that:

Most of us in the railroad development field would prefer to see all industrial
districts or parks developed by private interests. There are many reasons;
chief among them is our reluctance to tie up capital, not only for land
purchase but also development costs. . . . There is also the added cost of
advertising and sales.

Because they are operated on a break-even basis, railroad districts are
often referred to as subsidized districts. Additional subsidized districts
which have become popular since the 1940's are those sponsored by
chambers of commerce, community development foundations, or local
governments. The purpose in each case is to increase employment and
boost the tax base. Because such districts are created not for profit but for
the indirect benefit of their sponsors, they may offer such bonus
inducements to prospective occupants as low purchase price, deferment

28

The Art of Community

of taxes, free installation of utilities, and extremely favorable purchase
or lease agreements.

But one of the striking factors in the postwar growth of planned
industrial districts has been a rise in the number of projects operated
directly for a profit by real estate interests. This trend is revealed in the
seven-year period 1960-1967 as follows:

Sponsors 1960 1967

Private real-estate developers 32.4% 40.5%

*Railroads 30.2% 20.6%

*Community organizations 17.6% 19.9%

*Government agencies 11.0% 5.6%
*Community organizations in cooperation
with others and miscellaneous (universities,

utility companies, etc.) 8.8% 13.4%

100.0% 100.0%

*Typically Subsidized

It should be observed, in addition, that quality development has
occurred not so much among the subsidized districts as among those
sponsored and operated for profit. An exhaustive study undertaken in
1961 by Z. S. Malinowski and W. M. Kinnard, of the University of
Connecticut, revealed that those districts in the United States which were
sponsored by private real estate developers tended to be larger in size, to
have greater variety and numbers of tenants, to invest more in land
preparation, to have more land-use restrictions, to provide more services,
to market their sites more readily and for higher values, and to incline
more toward leasehold. Fourteen per cent of the districts so sponsored
pursued a lease-only policy at that time, as against six per cent for all
other districts. The study revealed an interesting detail which serves to
highlight the creative nature of these new industrial communities:

A minor but potentially significant trend was noted for new industrial districts
to provide some all-purpose buildings as "incubators" for truly minute firms.
In most such cases, the expectation is that the firm will move to another
location within the park if it is successful and needs space for expansion.
Interestingly, such "incubator" space is provided almost exclusively in
districts sponsored by private real estate developers.

Mobile Home Parks

The mobile home park represents the first substantial use of ground
lease for single-family homes. Its history commenced in the late 1940's,

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29

when a few automobile travel trailers began to be manufactured large
enough for permanent living. The resulting mobile home was the first
successful factory-constructed house. Because it resembled a trailer
more than a house, however, and was unfashionable, the significance of
this technological accomplishment was overlooked. Its implications are
still far from being fully realized.

From the beginning, mobile homes were distinguished from trailers by
their greater size. The majority of trailers today measure eight feet wide
by twenty to twenty-nine feet long, which approaches the maximum load
that can be towed behind the family car. Mobile homes, on the other
hand, require special equipment for moving. Three-fifths of the units
manufactured in 1969 were over sixty feet long, and virtually all were
twelve or fourteen feet wide. Many were manufactured as housing
sections and combined on site, doubling and even trebling the floor area.
Thus mobile homes compete in size with conventional, site-constructed
housing.

The trailer and the mobile home each gave rise to a distinctive form
of proprietary community. Trailering parks trace descent from the early
automobile campgrounds, especially in California, of the 1920's. They
have steadily increased in popularity and in numbers with the growing
interest in camping and recreational vehicles. After World War II, the
mobile home park differentiated from it, a mutation which has since
followed its own separate path of development in providing better
environment not for travel and recreation, but for residential living.

The mobile home park, as commonly defined, is "a parcel of land
under single ownership which has been planned and improved for
placement of mobile homes for non-transient use."" Indeed, the more
than seven million Americans living in mobile homes today are not
more mobile than other segments of the population. Seldom is their
mobile home moved farther than from the manufacturer to its
permanent site, but the fact that it is relocatable apparently has
psychological appeal. For an increasingly mobile population, it is
attractive to think of moving across the country by sending the house
ahead and having it ready to step into and prepare a meal on arrival.

Production of mobile homes has burgeoned in recent years with the
rising construction costs of conventional housing, yet their popularity
appears to be based as much on choice of that style of living as on
economic considerations. In 1969, more than a third of the single-family
housing starts in the United States were mobile homes. Mobile home
designs are changing and appealing to a wider variety of tastes. As

30

The Art of Community

mobile homes, with or without wheels, become components in town-
house, garden apartment and high-rise forms, they will likely take the
name of modular homes as a generic term for the entire class of factory-
produced housing."*

The industry, however, has experienced for more than a decade a
shortage of sites for placement of new homes. Chiefly responsible are
zoning ordinances, which are commonly drafted to exclude mobile
home parks of any kind but which, ironically, have the effect of
protecting from competition the unattractive operations of the older
parks that predate the zoning measures. As many of these parks, thus
protected, continue their outdated mode, this seems to further
underscore the "need" for continuing or extending the restrictive
ordinances.* However intended, zoning has slowed the process by which
mobile home parks have outgrown their "ugly duckling" stage— a stage
paralleled in the growth of modern motels by the early days of tourist
courts and roadside cabins.

Today's new mobile home parks feature such tangible amenities as
sodded and landscaped sites with two-car, off-street parking, under-
ground utilities with central TV antenna system; neighborhood laundry,
car wash, and recreational areas; community clubhouse with meeting
rooms, dining rooms, exercise and sauna rooms, heated swimming pool,
and golf course. A few parks even boast "equestrian centers" and ocean-
view lots. But unquestionably the single major determinant of the quality
of life in a park is an intangible, namely, management. So important is
that aspect that a feature report in Consumer Bulletin on "Choosing a
Mobile Home Park" devotes the major part of the discussion of what to
look for in a good park to describing the attitudes and qualifications of
the good manager."

The following excerpt from the transcript of a talk given by a pioneer
park manager at a trade meeting in 1960 is ingenuous in its expression,
but its keynote of responsibility rings true for park management
everywhere on every level of sophistication:

*The artificial scarcity of sites has had numerous side effects, one of which is a reduction in
the mobility of mobile homes. Not only are many home owners unable, because of the
shortage, to relocate their homes when moving to another city, but they find that many parks
will only admit homes which have been purchased from them. The desirability of "closed"
versus "open" parks is being debated in the industry. Certainly there is more architectural
and planning control possible in the closed parks. Only as sites become more plentiful will
consumer preferences become clear. In the meantime, the owner contemplating a move will
likely sell his old home in situ, for which it will command a premium, and try to buy a used
home in situ in the city he is moving to.

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31

You will find that the attitude of the people in a park is very different from
that of people who live in apartments or subdivisions. I once operated
apartments in Chicago. . . . You did not know who lived across the hall from
you. You did not know who lived below you, above you. A trailer park seems
to be different.* You can move new guests into the park and the next
morning when they walk down the street, even without having been formally
introduced, they say good morning, just like on an ocean liner. There is a
kind of spirit in a park that is different, and you must maintain that. Now if
you have an old grouch or crab, simply chase him out. Fortunately, under the
laws of Florida, I can put anyone out of my park within two hours; and I tell
my tenants that if they do not comply, I will hook on their trailer and set it out
on a federal highway and let them do with it what they want. I have been
very fortunate in that I never had to tell anyone to turn down television sets,
radios, or hi-fi. Tenants all respect their neighbors. You do not see any speed
limit signs or humps in the road because I tell them when they come in that I
am doing them a favor to let them live in my park and they must live like
ladies and gentlemen. They must not create a nuisance. I only had to tell one
man in my park to change his car muffler. He was deaf. One day I caught him
and I said, "you have a leak in your muffler. You are disturbing people.
Change the muffler in your car." He said, "Thank you for telling me."

I discovered you cannot operate a trailer park with more than one entrance.
At first there were two entrances in my park, and I closed one. The people
must know that if anybody comes into the park, it is private property. You
must know everybody who comes into your park. You have a big responsibil-
ity. In my park I have twelve widows, and I am responsible for them. I have
to know who comes into that park. You do not permit any solicitors or
tradesmen who are unknown to you or who break your roads down.
Tradesmen must qualify.

I once got complaints from my tenants. They said that the milk delivered to
them was sour, that the eggs were not good. I went to my maid and she said
the same thing, "We get sour cream." I called the management of the milk
company and stated that I wanted to discontinue the service and told them
that they could not bring their trucks in. After calhng several other dairies, I
made a change.'"

Despite the physical proximity of neighbors in the mobile home park,
one of the advantages cited by residents is the greater privacy they enjoy
there as contrasted with living in a subdivision. This reflects community
management, which the subdivision lacks, f

A small percentage of mobile home communities are nevertheless
developed as subdivisions. Characteristically, the developer sells off the
lots and moves on to new projects. With their land pattern frozen by
fragmentation of title, many of these subdivisions have become victims
of progress as mobile home design has advanced from the eight-wides

*The use of the term trailer for mobile home still widely survived in 1960.
fThe growth of home owners' associations in subdivisions in recent years represents an
attempt to overcome this deficiency.

32

The Art of Community

to the ten, twelve, fourteen, and double and triple-wide homes of today.
Such projects may have been built to accommodate twenty or more
homes to the acre, where parks are currently being built to ac-
commodate six or eight. Their streets are narrow and their basic lay-out
is obsolete by the standards of ten years later. More serious yet, if they
were designed for eight-wides, their lots are actually too small to
accommodate the homes being produced today.

Mobile home parks normally have the option of replanning and
upgrading or even of converting to a wholly different use as the existing
leases revert or come up for renewal. Obsolescence can be programmed
out systematically. In subdivisions, however, the land pattern is perma-
nently committed, and reassembly and redevelopment are unlikely
except where compelled through condemnation. This is the problem in
miniature of all cities, which are simply larger, agglomerate subdivisions.
Few sights are quite so discouraging as an obsolete mobile home
subdivision. It is a permanent reminder on the landscape of the crude
designs of early mobile home parks— evidence that nature rewards
flexibility and punishes rigidity in her always evolving forms.

Mobile home parks in the United States are estimated at more than
16,000, of which less than 12,000 in 1970 met the minimum standards for
listing by Woodall's, the established directory service in the mobile home
park field. ^' The fact that the number of Woodall's listings has declined
by an average of four per cent each year since 1962, despite the
construction of new parks, reflects the rapid upgrading of standards
required to keep abreast of the changing industry. Only 3,000 parks in
1970 were rated "three stars" or better, the classification which Woodall's
considers to be truly in the housing field and competitive with new parks
being built.

By extrapolating present trends, the following would seem to be some
reasonable inferences about the future:

The single-family house more and more will be a relocatable
structure that will be owned, in effect, as personal property is owned
rather than as real estate permanently fixed to the soil. By the end of
the 1970's, despite the likelihood of a near-term rise in mobile-home
subdivisions as mobile homes come to be regarded as standard housing
and are treated in the conventional housing way, the sites to ac-
commodate housing will increasingly be rented instead of owned. In
deciding whether to buy their home site, the family of the future will
weigh the prospects for appreciating value in the site against the
amenities of a leased site— and also, of course, against alternative
investments they might make. Demand for residential amenities will
become a potent market force in favor of leasehold living.

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33

The house structure itself has developed thus far in standard twelve-
foot widths because that is the width of a traffic lane on which the
structure must travel from the factory. The house will show more
variety of form as airlift transport comes within reach economically of
the majority of homeowners.

The communities that will provide the environments for the new
housing are already taking on new forms. On the drawing boards are
high-rise structures in which the module will be lifted by crane, elevator,
or helicopter to its prepared site. Already in planning are mobile home
cities of 5,000 or more units, designed in neighborhood clusters and
including recreational open space, hotels, and commercial center. Of the
four forms of proprietary community sketched in this chapter, the
mobile home park is the most in flux as to the physical forms it will take
in the 1970's and beyond, as it becomes a major expression of single-
family living in the United States.

Some Other Forms

This chapter has sketched the backgrounds of four specific forms of
proprietary community. In addition to these and some other specialized
types equally well-defined, a parallel development of what might be
termed real estate complexes has taken place. A precursor was Rockefeller
Center, begun in 1932. Again, however, no great development occurred
until the 1950's. The group includes many combinations of land uses,
often incorporating in a single plan facilities for retail shopping,
professional and commercial offices, recreational and cultural amenities,
hotels and apartments, medical centers, and sometimes even warehous-
ing and light industry.

Office centers and science research centers also deserve mention,
although it is not yet clear how much development they will have as
separate specialized forms apart from more complex groupings. The
medical clinic is yet another form which is evolving its own characteristic
pattern, while privately owned trailering parks and campgrounds, which
already numbered more than 9,500 in the United States in 1969, will
have an enormous development in the 1970's.

The 1950's also saw the first significant growth of the marina, which
had its beginning in the 1920's and 1930's. Like shopping centers,
marinas are developed both independently and in conjunction with
residential subdivisions. In addition to renting boat slips with utilities,
they may offer restaurants, a variety of shops and stores, and hotel or, as
they may be called, boatel accommodations. By 1969, there were approxi-
mately 5,000 marinas in the United States and Canada. The future of

34

The Art of Community

marinas seems assured by the growing popularity of boating; in 1968,
the number of pleasure boats on U. S. waters was estimated at nearly 8.5
million, or one for every twenty-four persons, while retail boat spending
approached $3.2 billion"

The last of the other forms to be mentioned is the generalized
community having a full complement of land uses. Still largely a
hypothetical case (a very few are in planning or construction), it is
virtually certain, barring some national mishap, to make an important
appearance before the end of the 1970's. Its precursors then will be the
comprehensive planned subdivisions called "new towns," which already
are retaining unitary title to the land in the industrial and commercial
areas and in the town centers. These "new towns" are characterized by
the Urban Land Institute as follows:

More recently we find the terms self-contained, integrated, satellite, and
balanced, used to describe new communities which are designed to accom-
modate residential, commercial, and industrial uses in harmonious patterns
and compatible surroundings. Two notable examples of this trend are found
in Don Mills, a new community in the Toronto area, and Elk Grove Village in
the Chicago area. Although not truly self-contained or self-sufficient, as the
term would imply, this type of development has proved that with careful
planning and judicious development it is possible to house selected indus-
tries, commercial activities and residences in the same development without
detracting in any way from the livability, attractiveness, or efficiency of any
of the above land uses. In the Don Mills development, for example, the
industrial areas are fully as attractive as, and in complete harmony with, the
residential and commercial areas. Happily, this type of development appears
to be gaining in popularity.

A number of "self-contained" communities are presently in various stages of
planning and development throughout the country— especially in such
rapidly growing states as California and Florida. One such development
currently underway is Laguna Niguel, a 7,000-acre project in the area south
of Los Angeles. This self-contained community has its own water and sewer
authority and is designed to accommodate a research park and an industrial
park as well as residential, school, governmental and commercial areas.

Conclusions

All of the proprietary communities considered in this chapter are of
recent origin, at least in their modern forms. The first half of the
twentieth century was a period of experimentation and preparation for
the rapid expansion that began about mid-century. If one considers that
the modern hotel was pioneered by Statler in 1908, then the hotel,
likewise, conforms to the pattern, despite the lavish construction of
"grand hotels" in the 1920's.

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35

One observes, too, that all of these forms are basically enterprises in
which land is improved by owners for the occupancy or use of the public
in exchange for market recompense. Thus, they are all real estate
undertakings, though it may seem strange to think of, say, hotelkeeping
in that light. Building management tends to be thought of differently
than the administration of land that is all on a level, though actually it is
not different. Multi-story buildings are but so much increased land area
stacked vertically in one place. The layers being sheltered by one another
and screened and consequently "indoor" does not change its nature, for
land use must be planned whether the land is dispersed or piled up—
whether it lies in one plane or in successive planes.

All of the forms show, as well, a trend toward larger size and the
inclusion of varied land uses. With variety of land uses, the forms require
more comprehensive planning. In each case, such coordination or control
as exists is possible because of the whole being at some time held in
single ownership, either during the initial stages of planning and
development or continuing over the life of the enterprise.

The trend to greater diversity within is accompanied by a trend to
greater size of the overall project. The forms are merging and combining
and including one another or are themselves being included in larger
forms.

Probably of greatest significance in the long run has been the develop-
ment of profit-motivated entrepreneurship in all of the forms. In the
early stages, each was developed for any of a multiplicity of reasons,
usually not for its own sake but to serve some other end. Its value to its
sponsor was indirect. It was entrepreneured for almost any reason except
that of returning a direct profit— to increase canal or rail freight tonnage;
to boost passenger traffic, as when rail, steamship, and air lines sponsor
hotels along their routes or at destination points served by them; to bring
more employment to a community; to broaden the tax base of local
government; to indulge personal vanity; or to satisfy a humanitarian
impulse. Such "subsidized" operations (so called, for convenience,
because they need only break even, at best, to be regarded as successful)
are of continuing importance in all areas of proprietary community
development. But they are no longer the most characteristic type.
Increasingly, such projects are being undertaken by private real estate
developers and by institutions for dollar return.

This business motive is significant for the future of proprietary
communities in general, for it assures that they can be self-sustaining
and hence self-perpetuating. By requiring the community owners to be

36

The Art of Community

responsive to changing wants in the market, it guarantees that flexibiUty
so necessary for the continued evolution of new forms. It frees them from
dependence on arbitrary factors for their form or scope of operation or
even their continued existence. It frees them from dependence on the
needs and vulnerabilities of particular other enterprises or the whims or
circumstances of individuals.* Because it is impersonal, the profit motive
lends assurance to long-range planning, free from danger of shifting or
changing objectives. At the same time it is flexible and accommodating
to every kind of activity for which there is any demand. The enterprise
that is managed for profit can change and adapt and ever serve new
functions as social needs arise and circumstances change.

The late writer, Dorothy Thompson, in 1954 paid a very beautiful
tribute to the impersonal role of business which was then just beginning
to move into the area of large-scale community environments.

Commercialism has been blamed for most of the faults in American life, and
buying and selling associated with rapacity, its principle being defined as
buying cheap and selling dear. The struggle to attract the public eye in an
advantageous location has been blamed for land speculation, the inflation of
real-estate values, and the creation of commercial and residential slums. The
commercial spirit has been described as the antithesis of the esthetic,
defacing beautiful landscapes with screaming billboards, blotting out the
sky with neon signs.

Commercialism has been accused of cut-throat competition, and socialists
and other social reformers have declared private commerce incompatible
with cooperative planning. Thus has the case against the tradesman been
built up.

As in most cases, there has been an element of truth in the accusations, as
usual unbalanced by other truths. The trader has been the great opener-up of
the world, the bridge between human cultures, and between country and city.
He has been the purveyor of news as well as wares.

More than any other group, merchants created the city and urban civiliza-
tion, with all its graces and amenities. One of commercialism's greatest recent
accomplishments is Northland. It is prosaically described as a "shopping
center," and that is what it is— together with several other things besides. It is
the most ambitious of such mercantile centers in America or the world. And it
is as new as the twenty-first century. It is extremely practical, and it is
perfectly beautiful. It is a model of enlightened planning, and of social
cooperation— between merchants, architects, sculptors, artists and civic-
minded citizens— and it is entirely the creation of private enterprise; in fact,
the creation of one great Detroit department store, J. L. Hudson Company, a

*It is not insignificant in this regard that company towns which are typically subsidized
communities, have long been objects of criticism. For a discussion of company towns, see
James B. Allen, The Company Town in the American West, Norman, Oklahoma, University
of Oklahoma Press, 1966.

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37

family enterprise which has capitaUzed and financed it to the tune of $25
milUon for no other reasons than that much-deplored "profit motive," the
capacity to think ahead, and the very human desire to create something
admirable and worthy of repute.

Northland— which flies its own flag, a white (wind rose) sunburst on a blue
ground, and, of course, the Stars and Stripes as well— is not one market but
a series of ten connected courts (piazze they would be called in Italy),
terraces, malls and lanes. The largest of these— the "courts"— like the
"terraces" are squares, the courts open on one side; these one enters from
the parking lots. Malls are twice as long as they are wide; lanes are smaller.
But characteristic of all of them is that their central areas are beautiful
gardens. Fountains spray water into the air; everywhere there are solid and
handsome oak benches where one can sit and gossip or smoke, and in
every court or mall a delightful piece of modern sculpture attracts the eye—
and suggests meeting places.

These centers are sponsored and financed by department stores, real estate
developers and builders. [All of them] refute the notion that civic planning
can be successfully accomplished only by government and supported only
by government subsidy. There is room in America for all sorts of planning,
under all sorts of auspices; the question is only who will have the greatest
interest in doing it beautifully, practically and economically.

Given not so very much time— and no war— America promises to be a very
beautiful country, not only because of its beauties of Nature, but out of the
imagination and initiative of its citizens. What has been ill-done will be
undone. What has successfully been tried will be improved. America, as
Walt Whitman observed, does not reject the past but translates and adapts
it to modern needs. Its spirit looks forward, upward, and aspires. And like
the builders of Solomon's Temple, the much-berated shopkeeper gilds the
columns of his emporium with the lily-work of art.

Just give us time, freedom and peace.'"

CHAPTER 3

Trends in the Real Estate Industry

Adequate real estate administration, even from a strictly business point of
view, involves thinking of real estate problems primarily as a matter of
community organization, with proper subordination of considerations
relating to the tangible physical facilities. To be sure, the importance of the
physical facilities is not to be depreciated, but physical structures and
facilities acquire meaning only in terms of people and the interrelation of
people. To think of real estate exclusively, or even primarily, in terms of
physical structures and facilities makes it a meaningless abstraction, grossly
deficient in terms of result-producing potentialities.

Marc J. Feldstein and Lyle C. Bryant
Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics

The fact that they are communities is what sets apart such otherwise
unlike operations as hospitals, theaters, office buildings, trailer parks and
so forth, and unites them as a class. This is an insight which is gradually
coming to prevail among those most engaged in the management of
income properties. But because its recognition is still relatively new to the
real estate industry, it may be helpful to develop some further historical
prespective by reviewing the role of the industry in the emergence of
proprietory communities from the end of the nineteenth century.

The development of real estate in the United States over the past
eighty years exhibits three phases. The first was the phase of "turning
over" properties— of acquiring land for resale in a rising market,
subdividing it, and then disposing of it in as many small pieces as
possible through a public promotion. The second phase was like the
first, except that the land was improved before it was "turned over."
This was modified speculation, for it entailed some positive production
of value and so brought some stability to real estate. This is the phase
we are still in, the era of the developer-builder and the planned
subdivision. But there are strong signs that the real estate business is
moving into a third and more mature phase, a phase that had its
beginnings quite early and is characterized by retention of land
ownership in whole title for continuing administration for income. Here
the reverse of subdivision occurs. As the desirability of larger sites for
effective land planning and management is recognized, land assembly
instead of subdivision becomes the goal.

40

The Art of Community

In these three stages, corresponding, of course, to periods which
overlap and blend in time, the real estate business is transformed from a
purely speculative undertaking dependent on an advancing market for
land— a good risk, to be sure, in nineteenth-century America— to a
positive industry planning ahead and providing services for long-term,
stable income.

The formula of buying a tract of land and offering subdivided lots for
sale at public auction was reportedly popularized by William E. Harmon,
who in 1887 originated the "purchase contract," or installment plan for
buying land. Harmon is said to have been partly motivated in his
subdivision promotions by a vision of people of moderate means being
enabled to live in semi-rural surroundings with open space and trees.
Stanley McMichael, however, gives an accurate picture of what the buyer
really bought:

The earliest developers simply purchased a tract of land at a place served
with suitable transportation facilities, cut streets through it, marked off vacant
lots with stakes, plowed ditches along the sides of the new streets, and
proceeded to sell the lots, leaving to the purchasers the problems of getting
pavements past their doors, sewers, gas, telephone, water, electric service,
and such other conveniences as a modern home demands.

Harmon's formula paid well. As others were quick to copy his lead,
land auctions became symbolic of the rampant land speculation associ-
ated with real estate operations of the turn of the century.

It is not widely appreciated to what extent the excesses of speculation
and the difficulties to which they led were aggravated by municipal
governments assuming responsibility for improving new land. There was
no way for a buyer to know immediately and exactly what financial
obligations he was undertaking, since he could not anticipate that further
costs in the form of special tax assessments might or might not be
entailed before the land could be used. Consequently, many purchasers
were led into financial commitments beyond their means, especially since
the public auctions appealed to that class of people least experienced in
business matters. The resulting confusion of titles and tax defaults in
many cases still has not been resolved, so that an enormous acreage of
subdivided land lies wasted and unused to the present day.

The second phase saw a merger of land subdivision with the building
industry. No longer merely promoters, the new builder-subdividers
improved the lots with homes and thereby realized a double source of
profit from sales. The combination worked particularly well, since the
improved lots increased the value of neighboring unimproved lots. This

Trends in the Real Estate Industry

41

took some of the speculation out of the subdivision activity by actually
creating a degree of land value. It also marked the beginning of the real
estate business as a positive industry, although its full significance was
lost on the run-of-the-mill subdivider who still thought in terms of
individual lots. Each sale for him was a separate transaction, unrelated to
all the rest.

A significant advance in this second phase occurred around the turn of
the century when some thoughtful and farseeing real estate men made a
serious attempt to identify the factors that cause land value. Theirs was
the first thoughtful approach to the question how to make real estate a
more stable and profitable business. But it would be fifty years before the
important answers they arrived at became part of the mainstream of
real-estate thought and practice. Their most important discovery was that
improvements built on a site do not give that site, merely as such, any
added value. Instead, they found environment to be the determining
factor. It was location with reference to surrounding land uses, both
public and private, that gave value to the land component of real estate.
The idea suggested a practical application: plan a whole tract as an
integrated neighborhood before selling any parts of it. Each part then
will increase in value by virtue of its relation to the other parts. Thus was
born the idea that good land planning is good business.

Other individuals had been interested in planning subdivisions before
the turn of the century, but more for esthetic and social than for business
motives. Among these was Squire Lorillard, who founded the socially
famous village of Tuxedo Park, New York, as early as 1885. One of the
nation's very earliest was Riverside, Illinois, built in 1869 by the
Riverside Improvement Company. But few people appreciated the
importance that planning was to have for the future of real estate as a
business. Among the first who saw its significance for real estate
generally, the first who looked to the future and dedicated their careers to
demonstrating that good planning is good business, were the group
including Edward H. Bouton, of Baltimore, Hugh Prather, of Dallas,
Jesse Clyde Nichols, of Kansas City, and Hugh Potter, of Houston. It was
these men who later founded the Urban Land Institute, which through
research and information exchange provided a focal point for the
industry in advancing good land planning. The work of these men in the
first decades of this century is represented today by some of the finest
residential neighborhoods in the United States. Roland Park was begun
by Bouton in 1891. It was followed among others by J. C. Nichols'
Country Club District in 1906 and Hugh Potter's River Oaks in 1925.
"Each of these explorers in a new building field was well aware of the

42

The Art of Community

work being done by the others. They wrote to each other and met at each
others' homes and at various trade conventions, seeking advice and
exchanging information based on their individual experiences."^

Not only did these pioneers study and improve upon conventional
street patterns, but they thoroughly understood the principle of
complementary land uses. Notable among their contributions was the
clustering of retail business properties instead of leaving them to grow
up randomly in a neighborhood. These first convenience shopping
centers were assets to the residential neighborhood at the same time
that the latter supplied them with patronage. Nor was the need for park
and recreational areas, schools, and churches overlooked.

Besides discovering the dependence of site value on environment, these
early community builders made yet another contribution to real estate
theory and practice. They recognized that it was not enough merely to
create a planned neighborhood. Unless some provision could be made
for continuing control and coordination of land uses over the whole area,
it would begin to deteriorate as a neighborhood as soon as the sites were
sold off into separate ownerships. The relative safety of the buyer's
investment in years to come was thus recognized as a further important
component of land value. Consequently, a great deal of thought and time
went into efforts to devise adequate means of assuring continuing area
control. In the cities, already divided into multiple ownerships, growing
congestion and blight were drawing attention to much the same problem
and demanding solutions there as well as in the planned subdivisions.

Two types of land controls were experimented with throughout this
second phase of real-estate development. One was the protective
covenant, which can be initiated at any time that the land is still held in
one ownership before being subdivided. The other was zoning, devised
for situations in which the land has already been subdivided. In the case
of covenants, restrictions as to how the land shall be used are incorpo-
rated into the deed that is passed to the buyer. Covenants, therefore, are
private agreements between buyer and seller. Zoning is an extension of
the police power of the municipality.

The question of firm but flexible land controls has been one of the most
difficult and persistent questions of twentieth-century real estate. Neither
protective covenants, which were first pioneered extensively in Roland
Park, nor zoning, adopted first by New York City in 1916, are satisfac-
tory solutions. Neither is sufliiciently flexible or dependable. As John
Mowbray, a past president of the Urban Land Institute, observed about
zoning at an Architectural Forum symposium.

Trends in the Real Estate Industry

43

They tend to be fixed restrictions and too inflexible; they can be repealed at
the next vote; they are unwieldy ("think of waiting for a council meeting
every time you want to make a curb cut"); and moreover, "you can have an
actual nuisance and still be legal."

Considerably more success has been had with private covenants, which
have been the mainstay of the best postwar land planning and develop-
ment. But the National Association of Home Builders notes their
drawbacks:

One of the least considered and weakest points in protective covenants . . .
has often been the lack of an agency representing the home owners as a
whole, to see to it that the covenants are observed. Quite often the individual
property owner hesitates to call attention personally to an infraction of the
rules by a neighbor. . . .

Ineffectiveness of private covenants can be traced in many instances to the
failure to provide specifically for a continuing and effective organization to
which the powers and duties set up under the covenants may be assigned.

Architectural Forum also observes, "Restrictions are more readily
placed in leases than in deeds where they cannot be enforced without
policing a vanished interest."''

Alternative to either private covenants or zoning, leasehold affords an
ideal means of land control, and one wonders why the real estate industry
has been slow to recognize this. Part of the reason for its slowness may be
that in the United States, historically, the owner of rented real estate was
little else than a rent collector. Until recently, he scarcely knew that his

! real estate interest might involve any more. He was satisfied to leave to
the tenant all major management responsibilities, including sometimes

I even the liability for repairs, property taxes, and insurance. This is
substantially the "net lease" arrangement that still prevails for most

I downtown real estate. The landlord was commonly thought of as the heir
of privilege, the passive recipient of "unearned increment." He was not
thought of as being in the active role of a businessman, nor did he
conceive of himself in this light. For in the nineteenth century, the
majority of those who owned property owned it for their own use. Those
who owned property as an investment normally expected to realize their
profit from resale rather than continuing administration. Seldom did
rental property, in any case, yield more than supplemental income to its
owner, so that he was seldom in a position to give his undivided attention
to its administration.

It is thus understandable why the traditional owners of real estate did
not perceive the advantages of leasehold as an effective tool for land

44

The Art of Community

administration. They were not looking in that direction, as were Bouton
and others who not only were serious entrepreneurs but also had been
studying the very question of land controls. With such men as these, it is
less readily understood. However, it is also true that their basic orienta-
tion was toward resale for capital gain rather than toward long-term
investment.

A more important reason why Bouton and others overlooked the value
of leasehold as an administrative tool may have been that they were
developing residential properties, and the American public has long had
a romantic notion about individual home ownership. This is probably
due to the social prestige that historically has attached to land ownership
and to the low prestige of tenancy on the Continent, which was, indeed,
quite often insecure in the unbusinesslike past of real estate. Moreover,
real estate was only just beginning at the turn of the century to offer
apartment rental housing. It would scarcely have seemed a likely
proposition to the subdividers to offer leased homesites, had it even
occurred to them. The tide has turned, however, in commercial realty,
and today's trend toward leasing consumer and capital property of all
kinds can be expected to extend into residential realty as people find
more and more that they can be assured the full use of property without
having to assume in addition, the responsibilities of ownership. There is
already full acceptance of leased home sites in mobile home communi-
ties, some of which will inevitably carry into others forms of modular
housing developments.

As the twentieth century opened, most of those people in the United
States who had any interest in real estate fell into one of two categories.
The larger category included those who were accustomed to owning real
estate but not to managing it in a business-like fashion. Prominent
among these were owner-occupiers whose properties yielded no rent
incomes. The other category included the aggressive business element in
real estate, consisting of those who actively traded in land as speculators
and subdividers. Among this latter group were the men who were
discovering sound principles of land planning as an aid to sales. Neither
group as yet had any appreciable experience with the on-going, produc-
tive administration of real estate.

In the second decade of the century, however, some changes occurred
that promised to bring together these two traditions or streams of real
estate practice. The market for rental housing in single-family and two-,
three-, and four-flat structures began after 1910 to give way to large
multi-apartment buildings. Except for hotels, these apartment buildings.

Trends in the Real Estate Industry

45

together with office and loft buildings, were the first important new kinds
of multiple-tenant income properties requiring the services of special-
ized management. The ensuing decades witnessed the rapid development
of multiple-occupancy income properties of all kinds, and the need for
specialized management services grew accordingly.

An important event in the appraisal field, one of the growing areas of
specialized competence in real estate, was the substitution of the income
approach to valuation for the traditional replacement-less-depreciation,
or "bricks and mortar," approach. The newer method of valuation
capitalized the net income yield of the property. Outstanding in early
appraisal work, Frederick Babcock wrote in 1932, "The future income
stream ... is certainly the very basis of transactions which concern real
estate values."' The older approach was suited to the time when it was
assumed that vertical improvements on sites, rather than lateral im-
provements surrounding them, determined their value. The new income
approach allows for both. It also allows for a new factor which is
beginning to be recognized as an additional determinant of the value of
improved properties, namely, management.

The use-value concept is not unique to real estate. As E. F. Hutton and
Company observes in its Market and Business Survey,

The lease represents a departure from the traditional concept of asset
ownership, as it involves only its use for a specified time. There is evidence
that this use-value concept is gaining acceptance in other areas of the
economy as well. The stock market may well have given a dramatic
demonstration of its prophetic qualities when it abandoned the asset value
theory of establishing value and adopted the price-times-earnings multiple.
The switch to valuing a company by its earning power rather than by its
assets is a good example of the use-value concept in action.

The emphasis on earnings in property valuation focused attention on
planning and management. With the growth of income properties and
the consequent emphasis on management, real estate administration was
on the way to becoming an industry. At first it was confined to small lots,
but the 1920's onward saw a steady increase in the size of building lots,
reflecting greater efficiencies in land use.

The steady growth of income properties, the increasing competence of
appraisal and management, and a more general sophistication in land
use, as evidenced in the planned subdivision, the larger lot, and the
search for neighborhood land controls,— all these changes made real
estate increasingly attractive to investors. Consequently, long-term
capital financing became more and more available for real estate
purposes. The war postponed development, but by 1950 circumstances

46

The Art of Community

were right for an enormous growth of commercial real estate. Not only
was financing available from institutional sources, especially insurance
companies, but new tools of investment and finance were developed, such
as syndication and sale-lease-back arrangements.

The decade of the 1950's provided the first unmistakable evidence of
merger between the important new streams of real estate practice-
integrated land planning and property management, the one developed
originally as an aid to subdivision sales and the other for the manage-
ment of buildings. Subdivision into small management parcels began to
edge toward obsolescence so far as progressive practice in real estate
development was concerned. For the first time, a trend toward the
retention of large-scale developments in single ownership for on-going
production of income was discernible.

It is nevertheless premature to call the period since mid-century the
"era of the planned community," as has been popular in some of the
media. For despite the comprehensive scope of many modern land
developments, so long as projects continue to be subdivided, they are
planned mainly for the present and inadequately for the future. Obsoles-
cence begins with their subdivision into parts. Richard RatclifTs observa-
tion bears repetition: "Once the lots have been sold off into individual
ownership, even a few of them, replanning and resubdividing become
virtually impossible." Yet continual replanning is needed for a viable
community, for "the needs of urban society for the services of land are in
constant flux; . . . buildings and street patterns and space relationships of
land uses become obsolete and ineflficient with the changing nature of
demand."'

Nor is the incentive of the subdivider conducive even to the best of
present planning. For as long as lots are produced for sale rather than for
income, it will be sufficient that development produce a salable article.

The significance of the phrase, "era of the planned community," is that
land development is now envisioned in large, comprehensive projects. A
number of large complexes have been completed in both the United
States and Canada, scores are under construction, and many more are on
the drawing boards. Each of these developments embraces a wide range
of land uses. Dallas' Exchange park, for example, is described as:

the nation's first completely integrated and weather-controlled business
community. Included in the Park are such facilities as a bank, an insurance
building, a department store, a medical research center, retail shops and
office buildings, multi-level parking facilities, and a hotel.

Trends in the Real Estate Industry

47

Comfort-minded developers have made provision to have all units of the
project connected by air-conditioned malls or pedestrian streets to create a
completely weather-controlled city.

Don Mills, near Toronto, and Kitimat in British Columbia, are
outstanding examples of whole new planned communities in Canada.
Projects in the United States include Columbia, Maryland; Reston,
Virginia; Roosevelt Field and Sterling Forest in New York; Prudential
Center in Boston; Science City near San Antonio; Empire Central,
Southland Center, and Exchange Park near Dallas; and University City,
California City, Conejo Valley, Laguna Niguel, and Century City in
California.

A significant feature of these large developments is that many contain
areas carefully planned for retailing, commercial, or industrial func-
tions, and these areas are being kept intact as functional units in order
to benefit from proprietary administration. Only in a few instances,
however, are entire projects, such as Prudential Center in Boston,
Sterling Forest in New York, and the Century City development in
California, to remain in unit ownership and be managed on a leasehold
basis.

Throughout the United States and Canada, the movement of many
kinds of retail stores, warehouses, ofl[ice buildings, light industry and
research facilities is to planned developments; in 1968, over forty per
cent of the total retail trade of the two countries was transacted in
shopping centers. "

This transformation in real estate is just one facet of a more general
trend in recent centuries toward increasing specialization of ownership
and the organization of capital property of many kinds into large service
units under unified proprietary administration. One characteristic of
economic progress everywhere has been the progressive specialization
and development of the ownership role, the progressive diff"erentiation of
ownership from use. Property in land is the most recent class of property
to manifest this ubiquitous trend of civilization. As lately as 1953,
James C. Downs, Jr., observed that

... in the past fifty years there has been a technological revolution in both
production and operation of virtually everything except real estate. The
management of business has advanced tremendously through the application
of systematic, planned operations, with emphasis on looking into the future
and thinking ahead as well as maintaining careful selective controls on
present activities. It is hard to realize that cost controls, personnel manage-
ment, widespread advertising, product design and research, careful public

48

The Art of Community

relations, and technical management devices such as IBM machines,
accounting and calculating machines ... are all the recent products of a new
approach to running business. However, this approach has not been widely
applied to the operation of real property. Even today, many property
managers are merely custodians . . . instead of planning ahead for the best
possible use of their properties.

Signs of the "new approach" were beginning to appear even as Downs
wrote, and today real estate is undertaking for the first time the
systematic production of land services on a large scale. No longer may
one say, as did a speaker at a symposium just two years after Downs'
article appeared, that "not being manufacturable, environment has
seldom been the subject of organized interest." Real estate today is
rapidly developing into the one industry whose strict concern is the
production, distribution, and maintenance of human environment.

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CHAPTER 4

Narrowing the Field
of Community Types

As was seen earlier, a varied assortment of special situations fit the
definition of community, ranging from private homes to theaters and
even passenger trains and buses under certain conditions. It remains to
devise a way of conceptually handling this diversity of special forms and
to identify some of the significant variables.

In making a classification of communities, the first distinction can be
drawn between those communities in which the private areas are
administered under separate and diverse ownerships and those in which
the land is organized in single title. The former, in which there is a
multiplicity of ownerships, may be either a subdivision or a condomin-
ium. The class of subdivisions includes most modern towns and cities. A
condominium differs from a simple subdivision in that the common
areas are owned and administered by a corporation or other association
made up of the owners of the diverse lots, with control proportional to
such ownership. Like the cooperative, a condominium requires different
management skills and more effort to operate than an income property
of comparable size. A condominium is a borderline proprietary commu-
nity; because of its fractionated ownership, it trembles on the verge of
sovereignty. It crosses the line when the owners' association can legally
compel payment of dues at rates which are determined by a majority or
other fractional vote of the owners.

Confining the discussion now to communities with undivided owner-
ship, an initial distinction can be drawn between those communities in
which the occupants of the private portions pay no rent for their
occupancy but remain occupants solely at the pleasure of the owner, and
those communities in which it is customary to pay rent. The latter are the
main concern of this book. They include the class of properties known in
real estate as multiple-occupancy income properties, and it is here that
spectacular developments in proprietary community are taking place.
Older and more widespread in our society, and functioning to give
suitable environment for many necessary kinds of activities, the non-
rental type of community will in no sense be rendered obsolete by the
growth of rental communities but will be afforded greater scope in the
new developments.

50

The Art of Community

There are a number of important differences between rental and non-
rental communities. The first is that the occupants of the latter always
have an additional relationship to the owner, such as that of customer,
employee, or guest, that takes precedence over their status as a tenant.
When this other relation is a contractual relation, as opposed to a guest-
host or kinship relation, then either the owner or the tenant may be the
party of the first part. Examples are the coffee house, in which the owner
serves refreshments to the tenant, or the factory, in which the tenant
performs services for the owner.

In the non-rental community, moreover, the owner never fully gives up
his own right of access to the private portions. The distinction between
private and common areas is less sharply drawn. Occupancy is more in
the nature of a privilege than a contracted right. Occupants have the
status of invitees.

Finally, the non-rental community yields no return, except as it may
enhance some other income-producing activity. It is therefore a subsi-
dized community. Rental communities on the other hand are income-
producing and, as such, ordinarily self-sustaining (although a minority
even of these, operated for purposes other than return on real-estate
investment, may be subsidized). The objective is to optimize the total
environment of each site within a system of sites in order to maximize
the combined rent they will command.

Rental income communities are fortunate in a special way. Their
income affords a quantitive measure of the successful functioning of the
community, a standard not available in other kinds of communities,
where the search for such a measure has engaged the thought of social
scientists since Emile Durkheim's work of more than half a century ago.
Pathology is signaled by a declining income line. The public administra-
tion must generate rentals at a level above the break-even point for the
community to be viable.

Its flexibility of land administration by virtue of the unitary title, and
the fact that it is self-sustaining in its own right rather than being an
appendage of another activity, gives the rental community a viability
that other kinds of communities lack. It provides out of its earnings for
its own maintenance and eventual replacement. On the other hand, it
readily accommodates within itself the non-rental and subsidized
communities which are an integral and important part of society. As it
evolves favorable and diverse environments for many kinds of human
activities, the rental community develops more and more its inherent
capability of accommodating the whole range of human purposes and
needs.

Narrowing the Field of Community Types

51

In addition to thie basic distinctions drawn above and outlined in
Figure 1, as specialized communities of all kinds differentiate to meet the
requirements of the activities of their occupants, they display further
differences that pertain to form and operation rather than to tenure.
Prominent among these are the distinctions of size, discontinuity, and
degree of transience of population.

Size is an important consideration for the operation of any enterprise.
This is evidenced by the standard divisions of hotels, shopping centers,
and other forms by size classes according to their economics of opera-
tion. Also, with increasing size the ecology of an enterprise becomes
complex. Larger hotels and shopping centers serve as social and cultural
centers for the surrounding population, transcending in kind as well as in
degree the limited functions of the wayside inn or the neighborhood
convenience center.

Some communities are intermittent. A theater is discontinuous be-
tween performances, as are passenger trains, buses, and planes between
runs, or a private home when the family is out. An office building or a
shopping center is empty at night; the community dissolves until
morning when it forms again. Other communities, though not discontin-
uous, have regular ebb and flow, such as the hotel, which peaks at night
and is relatively deserted by day.

Population transience is an important variable. The basic difference
between the hotel and the apartment house is frequency of population
turnover, and many operational differences between the two can be
related to this fact. There are similar differences between wayside and
terminal accommodations within the hotel industry itself. Residential
and recreational communities as a group exhibit a higher frequency of
turnover than do business communities, whose tenants make a greater
investment in fixtures and naturally try to stay in the location where they
have become known to their customers.

Three kinds of communities that illustrate some of these latter
distinctions are the theater, the passenger train, and the restaurant. All
are intermittent communities. Each has some unusual feature that makes
it an interesting case.

The theater is a rental community in which, during performances, the
seats define private spaces and the aisles and lobby are common areas.
The most prominent public service is the stage or screen entertainment,
although the services also include provision of shops and concessions,
sanitary facilities, landscaping in the lobby and elsewhere, and con-
trolled lighting and climate, not to mention the presence of ushers to

52

The Art of Community

I

Whole ownership

Rent payment

Buyer-Seller
Restaurant

Self-Sustaining

Apartment building
Hotel-Motel
Industrial Estate
Marina

Medical Clinic
Mobile-home park
Office building
Science-research center
Shopping center

Divided ownership

Subdivision
Cities

Condominium

No rent payment (subsidized)

\

Employee-Employer

Store
Office
Factory

Subsidized

Company town
Cooperative

Guest-Host
Home

Trend away from specialization
toward complementary land uses
in planned-unit development

Future?

Fig. 1. Classes of Community

Narrowing the Field of Community Types

53

escort people to where they want to go, to keep aisles clear, and to
maintain good order. Even these do not exhaust the list of services, for
the responsibility of a theater manager to his patrons is diffuse and
complex. Since the theater is dedicated to passive recreation, there is a
minimum of tenant interaction. Neighbors enjoy easements across parts
of one another's property to gain access to their own. Mores include
prohibitions against obstructing the view or the hearing of others by
wearing hats or making noise.

The passenger train resembles a hotel operation. Like the hotel, it is a
rental community providing a full range of services including sleeping,
bathing, dining, and entertainment facilities. However, the principal and
most remarkable common service offered by the train management is a
controlled change in the location of the community with respect to
surrounding communities. Similar observations hold for ships, aircraft,
and other transportation vehicles.

The restaurant is typically a non-rental community and is therefore—
as a community— subsidized. Booths and tables are the private areas;
access aisles, decor, and availability of food service are facilities and
services to be enjoyed in common. Occupancy is by invitation and for a
limited but unspecified length of time. Such space is not ordinarily
charged for unless unusual circumstances, such as prestige or special
entertainment, make it necessary to impose a cover charge. A cover
charge technically shifts the restaurant into the column of rental
communities, but it does not affect its subsidized status since the charge is
usually nominal and, like minimums, is primarily for the purpose of
rationing limited available space. It would be unusual for such receipts to
represent any significant return of income on the real-estate investment.
The environmental services in a restaurant are intended to attract
patronage for a food and drink retailing operation.

A final point of difference among communities that might be touched
upon, although it raises questions that are outside the scope of this
chapter, is the extent to which some communities are specialized to a
particular kind of occupant activity while others are generalized, all-
purpose communities. It will be enough at present to observe that in
contemporary society, proprietary communities thus far have tended to
be specialized to particular functions. There are few examples in the
modern world of generalized proprietary communities. Among primitive
societies, on the other hand, generalized proprietary communities are the
rule rather than the exception. In the light of this historical contrast, it is
intriguing to observe and reflect on today's gathering trend toward
general and complementary land uses in planned-unit developments.

CHAPTER 5

Structure and Function

The interest of (land owners) is strictly and inseparably connected with the
general interests of the society. Whatever either promotes or obstructs the
one, necessarily promotes or obstructs the other. When the public
deliberates concerning any regulation of commerce or police, the
proprietors of land never can mislead it, with a view to promote the interest
of their own particular order; at least, if they have any tolerable knowledge
of that interest.

Adam Smith
The Wealth of Nations '

The feature that most readily distinguishes the proprietary community
from the traditional Western community under sovereignty is the single
ownership of its basic realty. This structural feature is not the only
difference, but it is the key departure to which is tied a whole series of
functional changes in the community. As land title is fractionated, there
develops a tendency toward community disorganization. As land title is
organized, there develops a tendency toward more effective organization,
reflecting the wider scope for the functional role of real estate.

This idea will be taken up from three different approaches, first by
looking at the effects of scattered land title in a community, then by
looking at a model of the economy of the proprietary community, based
on integrity of land title, and finally by examining more analytically than
heretofore the role of the community owner.

The Pattern of Subdivision

The traditional Western community is a sovereign community in
which ownership is scattered in many parts, each person's interest as an
owner of land or buildings being bound up with that particular piece of
the community realty which he himself uses as owner or from which he
derives his income. Because of this, a conflict of interests accompanies
every change in the land-use pattern of the community. This conflict
becomes aggravated in times of accelerated change. The source of
conflict is that the value of a given location depends on surrounding
accessible land uses, both public and private. Each change in land use,
therefore, has a favorable or an unfavorable effect on the value of its

56

The Art of Community

neighboring sites. As Richard Nelson and Frederick Aschman state
succinctly in Real Estate and City Planning, "... each unit of land use is
dependent for its function on other units of land use."^ The dependence
varies inversely with the size of the site in question. It decreases as the
site becomes larger and more able to provide its own environment by, on
the one hand, achieving an internal balance of complementary land uses
and thereby a measure of independence of surrounding sites and, on the
other hand, by exerting a favorable influence on the course of develop-
ment of surrounding properties.

The conflicts of interest arising from divided ownership of land with
consequent identification of private interests with parts of the commu-
nity rather than with the whole, can be illustrated by a characteristic
situation. Imagine a case, such as happens not infrequently, where the
owners of downtown property in a small city are concerned to bring
about certain community improvements. In this instance, perhaps they
are concerned about the increasing congestion in the business district
which is making it progressively difficult for people to get downtown
from the suburbs. There is a sense of urgency, since some fear that
outlying shopping centers will be built and may divert the traffic
permanently. The obsolete street system, laid out a century before for
semi-rural carriage traffic, still sufficed even fifty years ago when the
growing population came on streetcars and walked to their destinations
in the downtown area. But when everyone began driving downtown in his
own automobile, there soon were not enough streets to handle the coming
and going, much less to move or park the cars downtown. Ideally, the
basic street pattern should be entirely revamped and the downtown
redesigned as a regional center with complete community facilities and
ample parking. At the very least, some streets should be widened and
more parking space made available.

In order to accomplish at least the minimum, the downtown owners in
our hypothetical example met one day and agreed to subscribe for a
bond issue and vote the necessary tax assessments on their properties. It
was an auspicious beginning. But when it came to the point of carrying
out the improvements, they found their interests as owners inevitably
opposed. All went well until the day they considered which side of the
street to widen. At that point, enlightened as they were, and with the best
of intentions, they found themselves poised for combat. The interest of
each and everyone was threatened. Because of the structuring of their
interests, each had to insist that the widening take place on the other side
of the street. When it came to parking lots, on the other hand, each
wanted them on his side of the Street and as close to his property as
possible— but without taking any of his property.

Structure and Function

57

In this stalemate, it was inevitable that someone lose— all of the town if
the improvement did not go through, or else one or more of the
downtown owners who would be deprived of their personal plans for
their property. The end result, if not continued and worsening blight,
could only be a compromise plan that would not represent the best
available thinking for the future growth of the town, and in which much
bitter feeling would be aroused over the push and pull leading to final
determination of the plan and to the eventual abrogation of property
right of some of the residents.

This exemplifies the difficulty attendant on any community develop-
ment program when the land is held in divided ownership. It is the long-
standing dilemma of traditional communities that has resulted in virtual
paralysis of the heartland of every major city. This is the dilemma, at
bottom, of effective land planning, which requires that some areas be
used less intensively (churches, parks, and parking lots) and some more
intensively (high-rise apartments and office buildings) in order to raise
the value of the property as a whole. So long as individuals have
ownership in parts less than the whole, their interests will collide with the
interests of others and with their common interest in any proposal that
would affect land values unevenly. Yet, to avoid such measures would be
to throw out planning or coordination of land uses completely, and with
it ultimately all land value. The habitual course is to continue in
stalemate until a crisis forces a solution that is at best short term and
achieved only at questionable social cost through the forcible interven-
tion of an agency outside the system of contract and exchange.

Aggravating the situation further is the absence of effective leadership
to arbitrate the conflicts or to salvage the best of the bad situation.
Lacking is someone who, while not identified with any special interest
within the community, is at the same time strongly concerned for the
success of the community as a whole.

This deficiency shows clearly in the older downtown business districts.
It shows in the relative inability of downtown merchants, as compared
with merchants in shopping centers, to cooperate in effective group
promotions, to coordinate days and hours of store openings, to make
customer referrals, to get better municipal services, and to pursue other
matters of common concern. All parties want to cooperate, yet they often
cannot seem to "get together" as they feel they should; the situation is
very much like a meeting without a chairman.

This and other problems of merchandizing in downtown areas, related
largely to the impasse over city planning, have caused downtown
business districts to lose business to outlying shopping centers. As early

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The Art of Community

as the period 1948-1954, Manhattan retail sales declined by three per
cent in adjusted dollars, and pedestrian counts and land values in most
downtown areas have steadily been declining for many years. An author
writes in the Journal of Property Management,

Today it is very difficult in a great many cities to determine the value of real
estate. . . . When a vacancy occurs in a property in downtown areas in various
cities today, it is apt to stay vacant a good long time. Most of the department
stores, most of the chain stores, and specialty shops are looking for locations
in shopping centers in preference to downtown. Very few are taking
downtown locations.

Another writer, after noting such discouragements to downtown
shopping as charge parking, tough police, noncanopied sidewalks, snow
accumulation, traffic snarls, lack of landscaping, dirty curbs and side-
walks, garish signs and lack of area store directories, observes that the
chamber of commerce "is not directed to retailing, and in many cases
there are several small merchant groups that are loosely organized,
poorly financed and inadequately manned in the effort to compete with
the concerted drives of organized merchants in a regional center."" The
futility of attempting to locate responsibility in the downtown business
district is further commented on in a planning report for Richmond,
California:

Generally, whenever commercial facilities don't measure up to people's
expectations . . . the people blame the merchants individually or collectively.
But it is not always their fault . . . Frequently, many people, including
businessmen, criticize property owners or the city. It is not always their fault.
But nevertheless it is agreed that "they ought to be doing something about
it." Determining just who the "they" is and what the "something" is,, is not
always easy. For the simple facts of the matter are that the problems are
often beyond the scope of any merchant, or any property owner, or any group
of merchants or property owners, or the city.

The inability of downtown merchants to "get together" is commonly
explained as a deficiency of merchant education, combined with the
drain of the better merchants to shopping centers. The feeling is that,
once downtown merchants learn and practice the techniques of joint
action that have been developed in centers, they will close the present
gap. Some downtown groups deserve very great credit. Meanwhile, for
the nation as a whole, it has not been determined whose responsibility it
is to educate the downtown merchants— though downtown department
stores are assuming some of the leadership role. Moreover, it is little
appreciated that shopping centers are only at the beginning of their
development and will work continuously and in competition with one
another to discover new ways of cooperation as they improve on the old.

Structure and Function

59

Organization requires leadership, and the downtown of a city lacks the
potential leadership that is built into the shopping center situation by
virtue of the single landlord. While he may overstate the case, a regional
shopping center director in an interview expressed his own conviction on
the subject in these words:

Probably that is the most important reason for the expansion of shopping
centers. When a merchant comes into a center, he is stepping into a place
where he is buying leadership. That is the whole premise. He has stepped into
something where leadership exists whether he realizes it or not.

Shopping centers show neither Main Street's paralysis of physical
form, due to conflicting land interests, nor the disorganization of its land
users due to the absence of defined leadership. These defects have been
resolved in the unified ownership of the shopping center and the
management integrity which this makes possible. Once the ownerships
are organized as participations in a single property, it becomes the
common interest of the owners to redevelop and manage the whole as a
unit in the most productive way, even to replanning the formerly fixed
pattern of streets and common areas. It becomes their single interest to
provide not only optimum physical environment, but optimum social
environment as well— through an effective manager who can serve
inconspicuously as expediter, peacemaker, and active catalyst to promote
the freest possible conditions for the occupants to pursue their respective
interests.

The Economy of the Proprietary Community

A proprietary community is distinctive in that all of its community
functions are performed through proprietary and non-political means,
that is to say, through ordinary business relations of the marketplace.
Every proprietary community reflects in miniature a complete economic
system— a society in microcosm. Taking for a model a completely
generalized (hypothetical) proprietary community, one can analyze its
economy in the following way:

The market is the outstanding institution of process, or social change,
in the proprietary community. It facilitates the performance of con-
tracts—exchanges of ownership positions with respect to every kind of
property— and acts as the social metabolism of the community.

The market can be divided for analysis into submarkets according to
the class of property or services dealt with. Thus we can make any
number of divisions of the market according to our purpose, such as the
land market, the toy market, the glass goblet market, the credit market.

60

The Art of Community

the nurse market. People do not always participate in the same market,
nor always in the same capacity, as seller or as buyer, but each partici-
pates now in one market, now in another, and in opposite capacities on
different occasions. On one occasion he participates as a provider, on
another as a recipient of services, now relinquishing, now obtaining
positions with respect to different kinds of property.

For the present analysis, only two subdivisions of the market need be
considered— that of space, or land, use and that of every other kind of
property. The one is represented by the inner ring in Figure 2, the other
by the outer.

The economic activity of the community consists of markets. People
move from one to another according to their purposes and needs. People
who on one occasion interact in the land market must also participate on
other occasions in other markets and in opposite roles. Those who on one
occasion give land services must on other occasions receive services of
other kinds. Thus is reciprocity among all members brought about. None
can operate in only one market, or on all occasions as a buyer or as a
seller, a provider or a recipient of services. Each person in our model
must alternate, now giving, now receiving, in different markets. If in the
diagram in Figure 2 a larger number of divisions of the market had been
made and were represented by concentric rings, we would observe
individuals as buyers moving about a great deal among different rings,
but as sellers or suppliers specializing in one or a few.

The term, services, in Figure 2 refers to the service of allocation— the
service of transferring title. For one discovers on examining the nature
of a sale that what is sold is never actually the thing itself, whether goods
or services, but the ownership, or the social jurisdiction, over the thing. It
is a psychological rather than a physical transaction. As Richard Ratcliff
observes of the real estate market.

In its popular connotation, the term "property" refers to land and buildings
in the case of real property and to various movable articles in the case of
personal property. But the real estate market deals in rights, not directly in
the land and buildings that are the property objects. '

It is this service of transferring jurisdiction to another— performing a
sale— that commands a return in the market. Every member of the
community is a buyer and a seller of services, the service in every case
being to transfer to another the authority to commit the use of particular
property, whether land, material goods, credits, or imponderables of
various kinds, or even the benefit of one's own judgment or skill. The
service is that of entitling others.

Structure and Function

61

Land Market

Owners
of Land

Fig. 2.

Reciprocity Between Owners and Users of Land in
the Proprietary Community

62

The Art of Community

The diagram as a whole represents not a division of the population but
a division of roles, since each member may act in a number of different
roles as it becomes appropriate from time to time for him to do so. A
person may occupy all three roles. He may rent a home in the community
and thus be a tenant, participate in the general market as an entrepre-
neur (in which case he is also a business tenant) or as an employee of the
owners or of certain other tenants, and invest his earnings in shares of
the enterprise and so become an owner. Figure 2 thus depicts relation-
ships among roles rather than among individuals in a community—
although it is the latter at any given moment in time.

The operation of the model is as follows:

The owners of land, recruiting employees and engaging services from
the general (other-than-land) market, employ these resources in ways
designed to facilitate the most productive use of the community sites by
the land users, or tenants. To the degree that they succeed, then out of the
resulting productivity of the land, the tenants are enabled to give tokens
in rent for so much space, and of such kind, as the individual sites are
worth to them at a market price established by their competitive
offerings.

With these tokens (claims on services) received in rent, the land owners
re-enter the general market in either a private or a bu.siness capacity and
receive services from the tenants, or land users, for which they now give
back some of the tokens they earlier received. Thus do the tenants, by
now providing services in exchange for tokens, redeem their tokens
which they previously issued in exchange for the community benefits
they received through their occupancy of the community sites. They are
glad to redeem their tokens; that is what they are in business to do. When
the token is redeemed, the exchange between landlord and tenant is
complete. Until the landlord entered the general market to buy services,
the completion of the exchange was deferred by means of the tokens or
counters— commonly referred to as money— which kept tally of how much
was owing in services.

The operation of this system in dynamic equilibrium can be traced as
well in the other direction. The land owner, in providing community
services and accepting tokens for rent in exchange, is redeeming the
tokens he earlier issued in order to obtain goods and services in the
general market. The cycle is perfect and reciprocal.

It begins to be seen how proprietary administration, operating on a
small scale in countless new and growing community enterprises, fulfills
amply within the scope of these operations all of the needs, public and

Structure and Function

63

private, of community life and therein gives intimations of a total
alternative to tax-supported institutions, whose forms have ever been
debated but whose premise lay for centuries unexamined.

Role of the Community Owner

No immediate change would be perceptible physically if at one
moment the land in a community were owned in diverse pieces and, at
the next, in a form of undivided interests. But over time, and barring
untoward circumstances, the visible consequences of such a change would
be enormous. The change would largely result from a new functional role
in the community, the role of the now integrated proprietary authority.

Among all his activities, the proprietor in his capacity merely as
proprietor performs a single service in the market: he lets the use of
community land. All else that he does is directed toward making this
service valuable and eagerly sought after. His objective, therefore, is to
make the community a productive and wholly desirable place for people
to live and carry on their businesses.

The proprietor builds value in the inventory of community land chiefly
by satisfying three functional requirements of a community which he
alone as an owner can adequately fulfill: selection of members, land
planning, and leadership. Ordinarily he does more than attend to these
three responsibilities of his land ownership, just as the real estate
subdivider undertook to become a building contractor after the turn of
the century, and today may see additional opportunities in the gas and
electric business. But these three are basic to his role as owner. Moreover
they are unique in not requiring expenditure of physical effort. They are
psychological functions, judgmental rather than physical in nature. They
are administrative functions.

The first two functions, membership selection and land planning, are
accomplished by him automatically in the course of determining to
whom, and for what purpose, to let the use of land. The third function,
leadership, is his natural responsibility and also his special opportunity,
since his interest alone is the success of the whole community rather than
that of any special interest within it. Assigning land automatically
establishes the kinds of tenants and their spatial juxtaposition to one
another and, hence, the economic structure of the community. Leader-
ship then facilitates community functioning.

In planning his community, it is desirable that the owner encourage the
most intensive use of the land that the technological development of

64

The Art of Community

society will allow. Only thus can he maximize his over all rents. Because
of the interdependence of land uses, he cannot realize this maximum
potential in a community of any considerable size by assigning all the
land to just one use, such as residential housing. Residential uses need
complementing by shops and professional services, recreational, educa-
tional, and employment facilities, and so forth. Businesses of all kinds
require nearby residential areas from which to draw customers and/or
employees, besides such specialized other functions as wholesale supply,
warehousing, and distribution facilities. Each land use requires, directly
or indirectly, and in differing spatial relation to it, most of the land uses
that are to be found in a generalized community.

Each land use in turn affects the highest and best use that can be made
of other sites; and it affects other sites unevenly, depending on their
location relative to it and to the other land uses in the community. A park
is of greater benefit to those residential sites that command a view of it
than it is to sites in the next block, and its benefit continues to diminish
thereafter, modified as the pattern of transport may make it more
accessible. A druggist, on the other hand, wants to locate in a good
residential area, but not bordering a park; he prefers to be surrounded
by housing. Thus a prime residential location would be worth less to him
than a location somewhat less than prime for residential purposes. Like
the park, the availability of the druggist's services .boosts the value of
surrounding property for residential use. In this case, however, the
greatest benefit may be to space located a short distance away rather than
bordering on it. The availabiUty of employment nearby— as in office
buildings or in light or heavy industry— again increases the desirability
of residential property, the optimum distance varying in each case with
their relation to other land uses and the kind of residential neighbor-
hood. Of these functional interdependencies, Richard Ratcliff observes,

Each parcel of land occupies a unique physical relationship with every other
parcel of land. Because in every community there exists a variety of land uses,
each parcel is the focus of a complex but singular set of space relationships
with the social and economic activities that are centered on all other parcels.
To each combination of space relationships, the market attaches a special
evaluation, which largely determines the amount of the bid for that site which
is the focus of the combination. '

The same insight is displayed in developer Bill Windsor's "unit
function" concept, evolved in the course of planning Empire Central in
Dallas, Texas. "This approach involves an analysis of all factors
contributing to the success of an occupant in a particular land use. These
factors are then combined in a program of sufficient size to justify their

Structure and Function

65

inclusion in a single geographical unit." The unit function approach to
planning is clearly exemplified in hotel management, where the unit
function is overnight sleeping accommodations and complementary
functions are added. As hotel accountants Ernest Horwath and Louis
Toth write,

Each establishment decides what services should be provided. . . . few hotels
attempt to operate a drugstore or a haberdasher, but they do provide such
conveniences for their guests by renting store space, with lobby as well as
street entrance, to druggists, haberdashers . . . '

Ideally, in the planning of a generalized community, each land use is
considered individually, in the light of its surroundings, as a focal, or a
unit, function.

The statement of Horwath and Toth brings up an important point: it is
not important for the community who undertakes a particular land use,
so long as the desired function is performed efficiently. If a business can
be conducted more efficiently by the community owner in certain
circumstances— that is to say, so the services can be offered at less cost or
greater convenience to the public— he may undertake it directly instead
of letting it out to private persons. The hotel affords many examples of
private services performed directly by the owning authority, such as
utilities, waste disposal, room service and meals, and so forth. In the
nineteenth century, the main dining room often was let as a concession,
as many complementary functions are today. As hotelmen gradually
realized the close correlation between dining room service and the
reputation of a hotel, they found it best to operate the dining room
directly in order to control the quality of food service. With the improved
quality controls of today's franchised restaurants, the cycle is coming
round again.

It should be apparent that the decision how and by whom the land can
be used to best advantage is an on-going process and involves no less
than planning the whole economic structure of the community. In the
shopping center, the desirability of planning as much competition in
each line as the market can adequately support has already been noted.
The planning process is highlighted by management consultant James C.
Downs, Jr., in discussing store rentals:

The problem of the manager is . . . finding a tenant who can establish a
business in the vacant store which will have the highest chance of meeting
with success. The problem involves substantial creative activity on the part of
the manager who must first analyze the location in terms of its merchandizing
potentials, and must then seek a tenant who can be interested in starting a
business in that space to meet that indicated demand.

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The Art of Community

Under unified ownership, as noted previously, the private interests of
the tenants are reconciled in the interest of the common landlord. This is
the basis of the third function of land, designated as leadership. By
virtue of the unified ownership, the management can act as a catalyst to
promote successful social action in joint enterprises of all kinds: in
economics, civics, arts, and recreation. Often this is accomplished by the
sponsorship and guidance of tenants' associations, which can serve many
specific community functions and, in the process, foster communication
and high morale within the community. Leadership also includes
arbitration of differences among the tenants, as well as guidance and
participation in joint efforts. More than in any other area, the art in the
art of community consists in this aspect of the manager's role. Here is his
least tangible or measurable, but potentially his most rewarding, role.

While tenant selection, land planning and leadership together
constitute the real estate function and are therefore the direct responsi-
bility of the landlord alone, this is not to say his role goes no further.
For there is no function for which the owner is wholly devoid of
responsibility, since he sponsors every activity represented in the
community by the act of providing space for it. Every other function
than the original three, however, can be performed by others, including
even physical security and the building and mainterjance of streets and
common areas. Whether the community owner undertakes these
additional tasks directly depends on what may be the most practical
under the particular circumstances.

Improvement and maintenance of common areas— unlike planning the
layout of streets and the other common areas which is a part of the real
estate function— can be performed by the tenants on a pro-rata basis.
Police patrol and fire monitoring can be supplied in the same manner as
common-area maintenance. Such services in shopping centers are
frequently contracted out and paid for by the merchants' association, an
arrangement which works well where the community owner ensures
through leadership and tactful assistance that the tenants' association
can operate smoothly and with continuity. The weakness of the tenants'
association is the weakness of all volunteer associations: it is the difficulty
of sustaining interested membership and stable objectives in the absence
of a guiding sponsor.

While patrol and fire monitoring systems may be included with
common-area maintenance, in a fundamental sense the security of the
community is a part of the owner's real estate function. Under land
planning, he supervises the design of all construction from the stand-
point of safety. He also chooses tenants with a view to their compatibility

Structure and Function

67

and complementarity with other members of the community and learns
to anticipate in the leases and to provide in other ways against disputes
developing among the tenants. By his informal peacemaking and
arbitrating, he resolves differences that might otherwise become serious.
In these many ways he ensures "quiet possession," as it was so admirably
phrased in the language of the Common Law, for his tenants. The well-
being of the community is very largely a reflection of how well the real
estate function is performed.

By his choice of tenants, deciding what land uses are most complemen-
tary and how to dispose them in the community, the owner is responsible
for the basic economic structure of the community. By his leadership
qualities, he then does what he can to help promote its functioning. His is
a sensitive role which requires utmost tact and rapport with the tenants. It
succeeds in the shopping center because the tenants recognize him to be a
businessman like themselves, whose interest, however, is the success of
each and every tenant and, thereby, of the community as a whole.

CHAPTER 6

Comparisons With
Primitive Community

From beyond the bounds of contemporary civilization, through
archeology and anthropology, we can gain a brpader perspective and
appreciation of the proprietary community. For the proprietary com-
munity is not unique to our time and culture. Its roots are deep in
human history. Man may first have emerged into permanent villages in
the proprietary pattern, but the pattern already, even then, had long
been established in the experience of hunting and gathering people.
Hence there is an essential congruence between the organization
described for modern proprietary communities and a basic organiza-
tional pattern that is widely general among village communities of pre-
literate people throughout the world.

The basic similarity between the village community in many of its
widely diverse forms reported by anthropologists and modern proprie-
tary communities— also highly diverse in form— is the degree to which its
organization is proprietary, based on land. Without engaging in a
technical discussion of the meanings of the word, "ownership," laden as
it is with judicial interpretation from our own Anglo-American law
tradition, what we are looking for in functional terms as we approach
the village community is the distributive authority over the village
lands. Who has the social authority to commit the use of land?

Within households, in the primitive world, land is commonly adminis-
tered by an elder male ini the line of property succession. For groups of
households, it may be administered by a clan or lineage or other group
head who is commonly an elder male of the kin group of widest span.
And similarly at the village level. This is "the familiar pattern," in
anthropologist Melville Herskovits' words, "of village land ownership
held in trust and administered by the village head in behalf of its
members, native or adopted, and family ownership, for which the head
of the family is trustee." ' The system is sometimes called seignorialism
since the distributive authority is exercised by a senior member of the kin
group at the span or level of organization in question. Substitute the
subgroupings of a shopping center— its shops and stores— for familial
groupings, and the same essential structure of land tenure obtains for the
modern proprietary community as does for the village. However much a

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The Art of Community

given decision about land use may reflect a consensus of the community
membership, the uhimate responsibiUty is not diff"use but is identified
with one or a very Umited number of individuals.*

Moreover, the same three functional requirements of a community
that are fulfilled by the landlord in a modern proprietary community are
fulfilled in a like manner by the head of the village community. In both
cases, they are fulfilled by the proprietary authority as a land-owning
function. These three functional requirements, it will be recalled, are
selection of community members, land planning, and leadership.

Selection of members, the first of these functional requirements, is
highly specialized in certain forms of modern proprietary community
such as the shopping center, where prospective tenants are carefully
screened for compatibility with existing members, for potential contribu-
tion to the specific market area being served by the center (an ecological
consideration), for credit standing, and for merchandising skills. There is
less scope for selection in the village community. Here there is little
control over the precise makeup of the community, for the population is
largely given. But the selection process is not less important when it does
occur. The village head occasionally allocates the use of land to new
arrivals— not infrequently in these days visiting anthropologists— who
are congenial to the group and want to take up residence, and by
dispossession he exiles individuals who have made themselves intoler-
able (exactly as a shopping center manager fails to renew the lease of
an incompatible tenant). However infrequent in the village, as com-
pared with modern proprietary communities, membership control is
still a functional requisite of community life for which there must be
regular provision. In the village as in the modern proprietary commu-
nity, however much consultation, via council or otherwise, may precede
a given decision, this requirement is fulfilled as a normal function of
the land distributive authority. f

*For simplicity, the discussion will assume that land ownership in a village community is
always unity. This is not always the case, as many exhibit two or more divisions of land
authority along kinship lines. Subdivision is limited as compared with contemporary
municipal communities, however, since cleavage occurs along lines of corporate kinship
groups rather than random fracturing on an individual basis. Divisions may also appear
when kin groups of different origin occupy the same village.

tAnthropologist Raymond Firth records an expression of exile from the Pacific island
society of Tikopia that evokes in its simplicity the pathos of the Anglo-Saxon poem, "The
Wanderer." Inasmuch as all land was owned by the chiefs, an exiled person had no recourse
but to canoe out to sea-to suicide or to life as a stranger on other islands. The expression for
a person who is exiled translates that such a person "has no place on which to stand."

Comparisons With Primitive Community

71

Land-use planning, the second functional requisite, is likewise compar-
atively complex in a modern proprietary community such as a shopping
center. Planning the kinds of enterprises, the size and number of each,
and their disposition on the site for the best long-term interest of the
center, all of which may be considered a kind of positive zoning, is the
continuing responsibility of the lessor of the land. Such planning is more
critical in contemporary society because of the greater number of
specializations of land use— each with its special requirements— and also
because of the rapidity of change. Where land use is constant and
relatively homogeneous throughout a community, as for direct subsist-
ence, this planning function is less in demand— although even simple
fields differ in their relative fertility, nearness to ponds or water supply,
distance to walk, and so forth. Where space planning seems least to be
required, it lies latent, nonetheless, as a function of land ownership.^

The third requisite, leadership, is the task most fully documented for
the village head by ethnographers. "Coordination" is a term which
sometimes describes this function. In the village as in the shopping
center, it is a role which is most effective when it attracts little attention. It
is in this capacity that a village head acts in council as a chairman, whose
purpose is to discover the "mind of the meeting." In the daily life of the
village outside of council, he acts in general in ways that promote peace.
In like manner, the shopping center manager promotes peace within the
center and guides the work of the tenants' association.*

The following typical characterization of the functional role of a
village head may help the reader who is unacquainted with ethnographic
writing to form a general impression of this type of administrative role
worldwide, or at least to counteract the popular misconception of the
"tribal chief" as a "strong man" ruling over his subjects by wielding the
heaviest club. The setting is a hunting and gathering society on the
northwest coast of North America:

The chief of the lineage was the custodian both of the intangible rights and of
the lands and material possessions (of the lineage). The lineage chief was in
this respect similar to the executor, in our own culture, of a large estate who
manages its various enterprises for the heirs. It was the chief who decided
when the group should move from the winter village to their fishing station
and commence work on the weirs and traps. It was he who decided that a
mask representing a certain hereditary crest should be worn by a dancer in a

*Generalizing about peasant villages in Southeast Asia from his experience in Hsin Hsing,
Bernard GaUin observes that the loss of "capable and interested village landlords who can
lead them in times of trouble . . . may well be a general problem in those villages where the
land reform has at least indirectly caused the downfall in wealth and prestige of the former
landlords."

72

The Art of Community

ceremonial, and that certain lineage-owned songs should be sung. ... All
these varieties of possessions, material and intangible alike, constituted the
wealth of the social group. The better the use their chief made of these riches,
the more was the well-being and prestige of the group enhanced.

In addition to the similar performance of the three basic functions of
land, further reflection reveals that in the modern proprietary commu-
nity as exemplified in the shopping center, and in the village community,
the incentives are much alike which motivate the land manager to
perform in the role for which he is uniquely fitted by his place in the
social structure. Rent is the central conception which makes this compari-
son possible.

In the shopping center, management is productive of rents, for it
creates an environment favoring the prosperity of each and every
occupant's business. The owner's role is to provide such favorable
environment, both physical and social, that present and prospective
occupants will bid for space, thereby increasing the rents the property
can command in the market. Rent returns to the owner a threefold
reward for thus socially administering his property to the use of others:
First, it supports him and his family in the material needs of life.
Secondly, since rents measure the value of the owner's services to the
members of the community, they are tangible evidence, for himself and
the world to see, of successful performance in his "social role. Thirdly,
rents enable him to perform his role, since they are the community
revenue and as such finance its operation; moreover, they can be the
means of raising the present level of community functioning, enabling
the owner to make it successful in even more ways that his good
management can devise. Rents thus reward the owner with subsistence,
respect, and opportunity.

An important aspect of the similarity between modern and primitive
forms of proprietary community is the functional correspondence
between rents in the one, and gifts and help traditionally received by the
village head in the other. Both "finance" the public functions. In the
village— presumably because of its cooperative structure— there is a
tendency for a disproportionate part of the public functions to be
ceremonial, and gifts in kind make possible the giving of feasts and the
accommodation of large public gatherings. Specific examples are legion
and take many specialized forms, from the potlatching tradition of the
Northwest Coast* or the Polynesian antja^ to the ritual performances of
the Hopi, where the chief distributes valid title to village land among the
heads of the several clans in exchange for their help in the village
ceremonial, each clan performing the public duties associated with a

Comparisons With Primitive Community

73

particular part of the village ceremonial calendar. Thus do the gifts in
kind and the help received by the village head enable him to fulfill his
functional role.

The functional equivalence of rents in modern proprietary communi-
ties and gifts or help given and received in village communities, enables
us to readily analyze the personal rewards accruing to the village head by
virtue of his managerial role and to see that they are in substance the
same three that accrue to the shopping center manager.

At the simplest level of community, the individual household, the
household head of necessity provides his food, clothing, and shelter from
his personal resources and those of his immediate family, which may or
may not be the extent of the village settlement. Seldom if ever is
headship on the household level a full-time specialization. As the level of
general productivity and population rises with the addition of house-
holds and groups of households, however, these resources will be
augmented by gifts and services until, with more complex community
development— especially in manorialism— headship may emerge at the
village level as a full-time occupation.

Self-respect and approbation by others, the second of the three basic
management incentives, result in each case from the shopping center
manager or the village head living up to the image of the successful
manager. In contemporary society, the established image of the success-
ful income-property manager is one who can generate a good balance
sheet and operating statement for the enterprise. In the village, on the
other hand, the typical image of the "good chief" is one who gives public
feasts and always behaves generously. Fulfillment of each of these
objectives depends on the manager's ability to command a return from
the enterprise— in the one case, rent, in the other, gifts and help. Such
return depends on the ability and willingness of the members to pay rent
or make customary contributions, and this depends in turn on the
productivity of the enterprise and, ultimately, its day-to-day
management.

The difference in what each does with the income from the enterprise-
declaring dividends to stockholders outside the community or returning
it to the community members in the form of feasts and generosity— is
accounted for by the fact that the village is structured as a cooperative
instead of as an income property; for the village members are also the
beneficial title holders of the village land and other properties of the kin
group. The income property and the cooperative, represented here by the
shopping center and the village respectively, are basically alike in

74

The Art of Community

structure except in one respect: they are at the opposite poles of a
continuum of differing degrees of overlap of the ownership and occu-
pancy of the community by the same persons. Since the village enterprise
is a total social cosmos, the beneficial owners of the land are the villagers
themselves; hence it is they who receive the dividends of profit accruing
to the enterprise, which come back to them as generosity and public
feasts.

A psychological reward accrues directly to the headman, or chief,
moreover, from any public display of the well-being of his community,
whether this be by means of wealth channeled directly through him or
not. Any such display reflects credit on the immediate social group as a
working organization since accumulation of wealth requires their joint
efforts. It is evidence to the members of the group and to the world at
large that they are organized, that they can "get together" and accom-
plish things. This display has a special psychological value in the village
context, inasmuch as the cooperative form of organization, as noted
elsewhere, requires more of an investment in activities designed to
promote group solidarity than do other forms of organization.

Finally, the gifts and help he receives enable the village head to
responsibly perform the functions of his office, thereby promoting the
interests of the enterprise and securing himself in his social role in the
same manner as the income-property manager.

The congruity here sketched between the village and modern forms
of proprietary community affirms the unity of principle underlying
human association in its endless variety of particular forms and
manifestations and the flux of culture and circumstance.

CHAPTER 7

The Nature of
Community Organization

Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise authority over them, and
they that exercise authority are called "benefactors." But it shall not be so
with you. But who among you would be great, let him be your servant; and
who among you would be first, let him be a servant to all.

Mathew 20:25
Mark 10:42
Luke 22:25

The general literature of social science suggests two alternative bases
of association in community life, sovereignty and kinship, with possibly
a third consisting of strong attachments of feeling or common dedication
to an ideal, as in a religious commune. Consider, instead, these
propositions:

1. That property in land alone can provide the structural basis for a
community. Relationships based on property of other kinds, whether
governed by kinship or by contract, as well as attachments based on
feeling , abundantly serve the members of a society in other ways but are
poorly equipped to resolve by themselves the spatial problems of
community life.

2. That sovereignty can better be understood, not as an alternative principle
of association, but as a condition that manifests itself where there is a default
or insufficiency of proprietary community administration. Communities
with weak or fractionated property in land are least capable of adapting
to change and lack appropriate means of responding to crises. Force here
gains a foothold as a response to a crisis which a community is
unprepared to meet. If the crisis continues for long, then the community
manifests the pathological condition of sovereignty, a condition in which
the force response has become institutionalized, or habitual.

3. That kinship and contract are functional analogues at successive
evolutionary levels of society and are the fundamental tools, each at its
respective level, for the productive administration of property.

76

The Art of Community

The Proprietary Principle

The fundamental organizing principle in human affairs is property. It
is a convention whereby people can get together respecting the use of
things. In order to get together, they must first have reference to some
standard or shared principle or expectation outside their own immediate
and personal desires in the matter. There must be some objective
criterion. The convention of property is such an impersonal referent, a
basis on which to arrive at a consensus.*

Ownership is social authority. It is the recognition by others of one's
own claim to property, and it is the fulfillment of that claim. It is thus a
50c/a/ phenomenon in the most exact sense. Ownership in any functional
sense is not established by individual claims alone; it equally entails
recognition of those claims.

A person who owns a given item of property has a certain standing, or
position, in society with respect to that item of property. He alone has
jurisdiction over its use— balanced by obligation to recognize the corre-
sponding claims of others. This pinpointing of responsibility or authority
with respect to a thing permits it to come into peaceable use by others, by
their making an agreement with the person who owns it. By the same
token, other property in the society is available to that person if he can
succeed in making an agreement on mutually acceptable terms with
other owners. In this way it is necessary to make an agreement with only
one person in the society as to the use of a thing, rather than with all in
the society who might have some desire for the item. Such positions can
be bought, sold, given, or exchanged, in whole or in part, for a limited or
an unlimited time, as agreed by the parties concerned.

The structure of authority, or of positions, in a society with respect to
resources is highly flexible and adaptable to changing needs. Different
items of property are of different value to different individuals, depend-
ing on their particular circumstances, skills, desires, and purposes. Hence,
agreements come to be made, and property changes hands, tending to
find its highest use. The differential between personal value and market
or customary price stimulates mobility in the property, or resources, of
society. Where more than one person desires a given resource, the rules

'Property, following the usage of Spencer Heath, is anything that can be the subject
matter of contract. Those things that have no present or imagined utility, or that have no
scarcity, such as light and air under most conditions, are excluded from property. The term
property is often generalized to mean the whole institution of property and exchange in this
discussion. For a creative approach to understanding the institution of property, see:
Harold Demsetz, "Toward a Theory of Property Rights," American Economic Review, May,
1967, pp. 347-359.

The Nature of Community Organization

11

of property allow it to be used by one without conflict or impasse among
those equally desiring its use. Thus the institution of property is a means
for bringing wealth into productive use in a society.

Ownership is not an alternative to holding and using wealth by force,
as some have suggested, for to call it an alternative is to suggest that force
itself can be a successful arbiter of the use of resources. Force hardly can
serve such a social function, for the more diligently a person acquires
and defends wealth by force and seeks to gain some security of posses-
! sion by that means, the less he can use it productively. He must rest one
I hand always on the sword, leaving but one for the tiller or the plow.
I Under such a "system," moreover, the security of one militates against
j the security of every other. By the convention of property, however,
I security of possession is achieved for all, not by physical might, but by
j consensus with respect to a set of successful social rules evolved from
j experience.

^ How self-consistent is a proprietary system? Does a developed system
of property presuppose an external agency to enforce performance of
contracts? Despite much popular supposition, the overwhelming evi-

j dence is that default and fraud are self-curing. To the extent that a
person acquires a reputation as a poor credit risk, he finds himself
outside the exchange system. A refusal to make compensation or other
settlement after receiving an adverse judgment in an arbitration auto-
matically brings a loss of credit standing. As a system of property and
exchange develops and becomes sophisticated in any degree, systems of
rapid determination and exchange of credit information make it
increasingly difficult for any to defraud others for very long. The
increasing impersonality of business relations, as more and more of the
population are brought into a world-wide system of mutual services,
makes it essential that this should be so. On all levels of society, both
primitive and modern, exile is the natural and automatic remedy for
default and fraud. It is axiomatic among experienced businessmen that
contract is as good as the intentions of the parties to it— that the only
strong contract is one which advantages all parties concerned. Thus are
property and service by contract the antithesis of conflict and force.*

*The illogic of the idea that, because some businessmen cheat and defraud the public,
therefore business is fraud, is illumined by analogy with card playing, an older and more
familiar pastime. Cheating at business is no more doing business than cheating at cards is
playing the game of cards. The point suggests the story of the minister who was caught
stealing chickens, whereupon his outraged neighbors pressed for a law against people
becoming ministers. The story is incongruous because the role of minister is so well defined
in our society. The role of the modern businessman is not yet as clearly defined, even by
many businessmen themselves.

I

I

78

The Art of Community

Moreover, since personal capabilities requiring the use of skills and
judgment are frequently the subject of contract and, therefore, property,
respect for persons and personality is a logical development of the
institution of property.

The convention of property applied to land brings land into use in the
same way as other kinds of property— that is, without impasse or conflict.

The uses to which any item of property, including land, can be put in a
given situation depend greatly on the complementary uses being made of
other kinds of property near and far. The possible uses of a bar of gold
or of a barrel of oil depend on many conditions of the market, the
accessibility of oil refining facilities, and so forth. With readily transpor-
table property, it is of little consequence if surrounding properties are
diversely owned and used in non-conforming ways, for people with
mutually compatible kinds of properties will bring them together. But
with property in land, the situation is diff"erent. Being intangible, space is
not transportable. Unlike other kinds of property, therefore, property in
land cannot be moved to an environment more favorable for its use. Its
value as an economic good is a function of its surroundings. Its higher
use therefore depends upon rearranging the environment to conform to
it.

Since the possible uses of a site depend on surrounding land uses
(ultimately, all human action is land use of one kind or another), it is
essential for its most productive use that the uses of accessible surround-
ing land be coordinated. Seldom can this be done eff'ectively under a
multiplicty of separate authorities. If surrounding sites are owned in
severalty, the several owners may or may not be able to accommodate
their various uses to a comprehensive plan, depending on many, often
fortuitous, factors affecting the ability and wishes of each. They are
neighbors of circumstance, not of convenience. "Even where agreement
can be reached on a plan for the community, the plan is not self-
activating."^

This situation extends to every kind of property sufficiently complex to
require unit administration. A comedy situation concerns three impre-
sarios who owned, each one, a third of a lady performer's contract. When
each tried independently to manage a different part of her— one of them
her legs, another her hands, and the third her voice,— they encountered
no little confusion in arranging her act, not to mention her itinerary. In
the end, their only reward was a kick, a slap, and a sharp remark.
Confusion would likewise result if the ownership of a company such as
General Motors were divided up in such a way that one person owned all

The Nature of Community Organization

79

the bolts used in production, another the stamping machines, another the
sheet metal, and so forth.

In the case of a community, the basic capital is land, and the product is
favorable environment for individuals occupying portions of it. Effective
operation here depends on undivided or unit administration of the
capital, no less than in the examples just given. The successful pattern
historically has been always to merge the separate titles in a capital
property, whether by pooling, assembling by purchase, or both, thereby
enabling the organized owners of the unified property to securely and
systematically make it most productive for themselves by making it most
serviceable to other people.

As was shown in Chapter 5, when land is owned in corporate or other
unitary title, it is capable of structuring a community— of affording a
basis for organization and concert of purpose among a population
engaged in many independent activities involving the productive and
consumer uses of property of all kinds.

To the extent that the land— the basic capital— of a community is
subject to divided administration the community tends, as the result of
unsuccessful efforts to mutually accommodate its differing land uses, to
develop a condition of sovereignty. The community need not develop
such a condition, given a stable environment. But environment is seldom
so lenient. Subdivided communities, being less flexible or responsive to
change, are least stable and most prone to develop sovereignty. Among
the kinds of environmental change that test the soundness of community
organization are increase in numbers and transiency of population,
technological change, specializations of land use such as accompany the
development of a market system, and conditions requiring sustained
military defense.

Volunteer Association

Some communities that are not fully organized proprietary communi-
ties depend heavily on feelings of solidarity within the group and on
leadership volunteered from one or more of their members. Such
communities rely on what might be termed volunteer association. Such a
community in its purest form would lie toward the opposite end of a
continuum from the fully organized proprietary community. In between
would lie those communities having some development of property in
land but in which the authority or responsibility for the land is not united
or clearly defined.

80

The Art of Community

Volunteer association probably occurs as an element in any group
venture. It is "spontaneous" in the sense that it depends on bonds which
are non-explicit. It is pro tempore rather than permanent or enduring.
Coordinate action must be achieved by virtue of shared enthusiasm and
common dedication to a purpose which transcends immediate self-
interest. It is characterized by its participants' volunteering their services
to a felt common purpose and occasionally enduring private sacrifice
without necessarily any expectation of return other than personal
satisfaction for having contributed. In no case is there reason to expect
return in proportion to contribution, nor is voice in determining policy so
measured. Policy is determined on some other basis, such as per capita
vote, lottery, charismatic leadership, or a combination of factors.

Association that springs up in time of crisis is characteristically
volunteer. Cultural and civic organizations commonly depend on volun-
teer participation. The weakness of such groups is that, while crises or
special events may bring out leadership from within the ranks, they have
difficulty sustaining organization and membership interest during the
interim periods of normalcy. It is for this reason that "cooperative"
ventures in retailing, housing and other fields must devote a dispropor-
tionate amount of time and eff'ort to developing and sustaining member-
ship interest.

Because of this weakness, volunteer organization does not afford a
permanent basis on which to structure a community. Attempts to make it
succeed, commonly described as experiments in voluntary collectivism,
have regularly failed. Religious communes come closest to succeeding,
especially if sponsored by a parent religious order which provides some
management function such as screening prospective members for
adherence to the ideals of the commune. Such a group proves most
enduring if, instead of attempting to be biologically self-perpetuating, it
adopts a rule of celibacy and segregation of the sexes, to prevent
recruitment by marriage or birth or the formation of bonds on bases
other than ideology.

Volunteer action is a satisfactory basis for the administration of
community sites and resources only where there is emotional commit-
ment sufficient to overcome the ever conflicting site interests. For without
property in land, every disposition of land use would have to optimize
simultaneously every individual member's preferences— and continue to
do so— if there were to be unanimous agreement. Because of the
interdependencies among human activities and the variable effects of
their juxtaposition in space, such unanimity is seldom even momentarily
possible. Without an impersonal basis for negotiating the use of sites,
conflict inevitably develops and, with it, eventual disintegration.

The Nature of Community Organization 81

The normal role of volunteer participation in the social scheme of
things is auxiliary. It is not self-sustaining but requires sponsorship to
stabilize it, to steady its purpose, to assure continuity. Volunteer partici-
pation succeeds best when its constitutional weakness is understood and
allowed for. Under such conditions it can develop magnificent strengths.
A proprietary community authority is in an ideal position to encourage,
occasionally guide, and secure public recognition of such volunteer
associations as it may be in the interest of the community, for artistic and
cultural purposes, to foster.

The continuum from the wholly volunteer community (probably a
hypothetical case only) to the fully developed proprietary community
consists of progressive degrees of application of property to land to meet
the functional requirements of an enduring community. Such a contin-
uum can be set out with the help of three diagrams.

The wholly volunteer community, having no private property in land,
administers (to the extent it can attain unanimity) the entire land of the
community; the area of public jurisdiction is coterminous with the
community. Since the interest of the community as a whole is not
represented, and usufruct vests equally in every member, there is security
of use for none. Public and private authority over land are equally
tenuous, if they exist at all. In the diagrams that follow, horizontal and
vertical lines show the division into public and private land areas, and
slant lines indicate the extent of the public jurisdiction, however it may
be effected. Grey indicates a lack of firm authority over land, whether
private or public. The volunteer community is represented schematically
thus:

82

The Art of Community

The first step toward the fully developed proprietary community is the
introduction of private property in land as a means of arbitrating the
individual and private, or exclusive, uses of land. Its advantages will be
considered shortly. It also has disadvantages. Since the private areas are
now under the jurisdiction of private persons, they are removed from the
public jurisdiction. The public authority can no longer make any
disposition of the private areas without infringing property. We now
have security of use, a guarantee of quiet possession in the private areas,
but the sphere of public jurisdiction has been narrowed accordingly, as
shown in this diagram for the middle stages on the continuum:

The middle stages differ from one another in the several ways in
which they administer the public jurisdiction, which is now restricted to
the common area alone.

The first way is for the common area to continue to be administered
by the volunteer participation of all who use it. The only increment of
the property principle here has been the adoption of private ownership
of the separate areas.

A second way is for the common area to be owned by an association of
the individual land owners and administered by them through the
association. This represents a further advance of the proprietary princi-
ple into the community, for it limits responsibility for administration of
the common area to the owners of the surrounding properties, or to those
persons who, on the whole, have the greatest interest in its eflficient
administration. But within the association of land owners, the organiza-
tion is still on a volunteer basis.

The Nature of Community Organization

83

A third way is for the vote and the apportionment of costs of
administration of the common area to be determined according to
amount of ownership in the community, instead of on a per capita basis.

An arrangement whereby a common area is administered by the
surrounding owners-in-severalty is called a condominium. This plan of
organization has seen increasing use in residential subdivision in the
United States since World War II. Condominium is not to be confused
with the cooperative plans that became popular, especially in apartment
houses, in the 1930's. Cooperative arrangements are similar in actual
operation (artificially made so by their restrictive rule tying shares of
ownership to unit occupancy), but they must classify as variants of the
fully proprietary community, whose essential characteristic of unified
ownership they share.*

At the end of the continuum is the fully organized proprietary
community. Here the entire land of the community is owned under single
title, with the separate parts leased out. Once more the public jurisdiction
is extended to include the whole community, but now this is an effective,
proprietary j urisdiction.

*Condominium apartments and office buildings are socially retrogressive for a number
of reasons, one of them being that they produce such a fragmentation of titles, not only on
the ground but in the airspace over the ground, as to preclude the possibility in many cases
even of rebuilding on the same site, much less reassembling the land at a later date for
redevelopment. Thus they lead to increasing dependence on the political process of
condemnation. The popularity of condominiums, like that of today's cooperatives, results
from monetary uncertainty, F.H.A. subsidy, and present-day tax law.

84

The Art of Community

All the lines are now black to indicate firm authority, both private and
public, over land. The custom of property now gives security to individ-
ual users at the same time that it leaves the pattern of land uses in the
community flexible. It aff'ords a means whereby the basic pattern can be
changed, gradually and continuously as leaseholds revert, according to
the evolving character of the demand for land in the community.

The series from volunteer to fully proprietary community represents a
logical ordering only. It does not correspond to any known historical or
chronological process or development. The differences between the
stages can be summarized in the following way:

I II

Administration Administration
of all by all. by all of
common
areas only.

HI

Administration
of common
areas by
adjacent
owners only.

IV V
Administration Administration

of common
areas by
adjacent
owners only
and in

proportion to
their separate
holdings.

of all as a
unit by the
organized
owners of the
entire

community.

All of the forms to the right of I are distinguished by the presence of
rules of property for the determination of private land uses. Even where
title is not unitary, property in land brings with it definite advantages. It
brings not only security of possession, but flexibility in land use. For each
new commitment of land to a use need not receive the detailed approval
of all the community members, a practically impossible task, but only of
the owner of the particular sites in question. Impasse is largely avoided
because the social authority to commit the use of the property is
conveyed by the others' recognition of one's ownership.

Short of the fully-developed proprietary community, a degree of
"mobility" accrues to real property by virtue of the fact that its
ownership can be bought, sold, and exchanged. Gradually sites in a
community are acquired for new uses in the proximity of sites already
being put to compatible and complementary uses— as, for example, a
haberdasher acquiring a site for his business in the retailing section of
town, or a manufacturer locating adjacent to railroad and docking
facilities. The land-use pattern of a community thus gradually evolves.
But this "mobility" is still far less than the actual mobility of tangible
properties. The resulting market lag leads to a gradual impairment of the
available uses of sites in the community or neighborhood by the

The Nature of Community Organization

85

conflicting uses of surrounding property. This condition of paralysis over
an area has received the descriptive name of urban blight. The process
tends to accelerate according to the smallness of the units separately
owned.

Even with fragmented land title, the mere recognition of ownership
has the advantage that it permits individual security of use and a degree
of flexibiUty in the land-use pattern. It allows also the possibility that free
trading in land will result in the consolidation of small ownerships. Large
administrative units can be put together by the acquisition of lesser
parcels, either in fee or in leasehold or in combinations of both. As titles
combine, pressures and conflicts decline and sovereignty is less invoked.

What is Sovereignty?

When the land-use pattern so far ceases to function for a community
that force is called upon to bring relief from threatened paralysis, we
encounter sovereignty.

Force is not an organizing principle in its own right— a basis for
association— but a natural and primitive expedient in crisis. Force arises
in situations where action is called for but we do not know what kind—
where we are impelled to action but do not know what is appropriate to
accomplish our objective, if indeed we are clear what the objective is. It
arises in those situations where any kind of action seems preferable to no
action. The exercise of force in community aff'airs indicates a lack of
understanding of alternatives, an insufficiency of social technology. It
represents not a kind of social organization, but the lack of it.

Force is the manipulation of a person or thing in disregard of its own
volition or nature. In society, force is violence to property. To appropri-
ate another's property is to disregard that person's social nature, for it
destroys his functional capacity which is the prime attribute of a person
in society. To restrain his person is to do violence to his most intimate
property.

By interfering with an individual's functioning in his social role as
owner or custodian of a part of the resources of the community, force is
dysfunctional not only for the individual, but also for the community of
which he is part. This is not to say that force need be dysfunctional in
every circumstance. For while it is true that a given individual cannot be
an asset to the community while under restraints, it may be that his active
inclination at the moment is to disrupt the aff'airs of others. In the
absence of knowing how to restore this person to social cooperation and

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so realize his potential value to the whole community, a crisis exists in
which force may be the only response available. That force may not be
dysfunctional under the given circumstances. But neither is it functional
in any positive sense since it does not restore that person's social
functioning, and it neutralizes him who is asserting the force from any
positive role in society. Even in these circumstances, moreover, it makes
as little sense to insist that he who asserts the force has a right to do so-
even defensively— as to insist that he has a right to act ignorantly. That he
will do so on occasion is not in dispute, only that he can ever vindicate
himself on those occasions by appealing to criteria of right and wrong. It
is not a question of morality; // is simply unfortunate, many times tragic.
The challenge and opportunity for mankind, the way of civilization, is
constantly to discover the alternatives.

For the present discussion of sovereignty— which follows generally the
analysis formulated by the early nineteenth-century jurist, John Austin-
government, or sovereignty, will be defined as institutionalized force.
Force in turn, for analytic conciseness, will be defined as interference
with property. The discussion, therefore, will concern the systematic
limitations on property in community life. Depending on the context, the
term sovereignty v/iW refer either to the application of the force itself or to
the established machinery of power.

There are, basically, three ways that property can be infringed. Its use
can be restricted or circumscribed; the property itself can be taken
outright as a whole; or it can be taken in part. These three possibliities
correspond to what is regarded in political science as the three separate
powers of sovereignty, namely, the police power, the power of eminent
domain, and the taxing power— the powers to regulate, to expropriate,
and to tax. These three are the basic powers inherent in sovereignty
above and beyond any and all constitutional or other provisions relating
to form or procedure of government.

The origin of the state is a question that has commanded increasing
attention in anthropology in recent years. It has become evident that
states have developed not once but many times from non-state condi-
tions. Certainly a generic cause is the inflexibility of a subdivided land-
use pattern. This will be developed briefly, below. Other possible stimuli
are considered in the next and final chapter, which is concerned with
historical questions and process of change.

In the conflicts of land interest that tend to develop especially in those
societies having more specializations of land use, as opposed to the
village community where land use is relatively homogeneous, the

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87

employment of force by some community members against others may
bring temporary relief for some. But it does not solve the underlying
problem, which is the inflexibility of the existing land-use pattern. When
an impasse reaches a crisis affecting a considerable number of people in
the community, then a portion of the population frequently assumes an
expropriative power over other members sufficient to restructure the
situation closer to the "public interest." Once such a machinery of
expropriation is set up, however, the question of common interest must
be interpreted and the machinery of power must be administered— by
members of the same population that finds itself divided in conflict. The
former impasse is transformed into active rivalry in the push and pull to
influence both the formulation of policy and the administration of the
program in ways that would least likely impair or most likely favor each
person's private interest at the expense of others. The outcome seldom
coincides with the public interest, however that might be determined, for
it will be skewed and distorted in the rivalry leading to it. The best
reasonable hope is that the public interest will be approximated.

To cast the thought in another form, where land is held in divided title,
the common interest in not represented. Yet someone must speak and act
for it. If there is a sovereign authority, it is hobbled by the demands of
political expediency. The public, on the other hand, is hobbled by its
multiplicity of separate interests, none of which coincide with the whole
public interest. If there is no sovereignty, then, when the lack of any
assertion of the common interest becomes critical, the citizens may
attempt to overcome their own diversity of interests by establishing one—
to accomplish by force such actions as may seem necessary for the
general interest, eff"ecting a compromise by necessarily hurting or
overriding the interests of some of their number. But the very division of
interests which prompted them to such a step causes the citizens to bring
so many pressures to bear on the way the power created is used— both in
the selection of objectives and in the way these are carried out— as to
destroy the very ends they set out to attain.

Nor would it be in any private interest to have a sovereignty that would
pursue its course rigidly. Inasmuch as sovereignty is expropriative, the
flexibility in the give and take of political maneuvering affords some
recourse should one's own interests be threatened. The prudent individ-
ual tolerates slippage in governmental machinery as insurance against a
time when he might have nothing else to fall back on to protect his own
self-interest. Nor, hopefully, would he deny the same security to others.

Thus sovereignty originates in a deficiency condition in the
community— a deficiency of organization. It represents a crisis in

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community administration. The attributes of a community in a state of
sovereignty differ remarkably from those of a fully developed proprie-
tary community:

1. Integrity. Conflicts of interest occur on three levels in communities
under sovereignty. First, private interests come into conflict with one
another over the lack of coordination of land uses. Secondly, private
interests find themselves in chronic conflict with the "public interest"
because the sovereign authority survives and operates wholly by the
systematic expropriation of property through taxation. Thirdly, the
personal self-interest of the public officer conflicts with his role, for his
self-interest is to stay in office, yet to stay in office requires compromising
the public interest at many points. All of these conflicts characterize the
sovereign, but none the proprietary, community.

2. Role Definition. In comparison with that of a sovereign official, the
role of an owner is clearly defined. His obligations toward his tenants are
detailed in the lease agreements negotiated with each. The role of the
sovereign official, on the other hand, is ambiguous. It is complicated by
the fact that he is seldom free to act at his own discretion to further the
public interest even as he understands it. The ambiguity stems from the
fact that his own self-interest and that of the community are not
coordinate, so that it is impossible to serve both consistently. Is his role to
hold office, or to serve the public interest? Since the second depends on
the first, the sovereign can always rationalize, as pursuit of the first, his
compromise of the second.

This poses a dilemma for the conscientious public administrator who is
willing to sacrifice his own interest in favor of the community. He must
hold office before he can hope to serve the public, but in order to gain
office, he regularly must compromise his own informed judgment in
order to please those who he thinks can help him get there. They expect
him in turn, once he is in office, to represent their views instead of his
own; so indebtedness begins in office. Moreover, he must continue to
compromise in order to keep in office. His private interest— to be an office
holder— is therefore at odds with the public interest. The means are
incompatible with the end. For he must continue to try to satisfy those
who put him in power— party officials and segments of the public whose
interests are not coextensive with the public interest. By the nature of the
problem he cannot succeed even in this, for he cannot be all things to all
men. But that is what he must attempt.

3. Authority. The greatest dilemma of the public officer in a sovereign
community is his lack of authority. He is a non-owner attempting to

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89

administer property of others. The administrator of a proprietary
community, on the other hand, faces no such problem, for his adminis-
tration is founded on the universal consensus of property, rather than the
precarious balancing of favor from divided elements of the population.
The proprietor is free to exercise his own judgment, for he has social
authority that his counterpart on the shifting ground of sovereignty
lacks.

The quasi-authority of force displayed by a sovereign is altogether
different from the social authority of ownership. It must be monopolized
by the state, whereas the authority of ownership exercised by the
administrators of a proprietary community is the same in kind as the
authority which pervades the community at all levels of its daily life.*

4. Finance. The sovereign public authority is financed by taxes, the
proprietary by rents. There are at least two important differences
between rent and taxes, at least two ways to distinguish them. First, the
payment of rent follows from individual negotiation and agreement.
Taxes, on the other hand, are assessed without regard for the wishes of
individuals and are collected, if need be, by force. Neither the amount of
assessment, nor the way in which payment shall be made, nor the kind or
extent of services the public authority may provide, are subject to
individual negotiation.

Secondly, rent is a definite amount for the term of the agreement,
whereas taxes can be changed at any time, unilaterally, by appropriate
legislation.

A further distinction between rent and taxes is that rents follow, rather
than precede, the improvement of land and are paid for services actually
rendered rather than for services which are only anticipated. Rent is
recompense. It is reciprocity for the service of transferring social
jurisdiction over desirable land. Taxes, on the other hand, must be
collected prior even to the possibility of public improvements, hence are
reciprocal in anticipation or hope only.

Finally, the proprietary authority improves its own land and then
administers it in ways that produce income. This rent income can then be
invested in further improving or maintaining the property, which creates
further demand and additional rent income. But taxes must be collected

*The distinction recalls an observation repeated many times by the prehistorian, V.
Gordon Childe, in discussing the rise of city states and the first appearances of sovereignty.
He observed that community headship underwent a qualitative change, that kingship
emerged out of society, was raised above it. "*

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in reverse order, in advance of public improvements, since the sovereign
authority has no property of its own to improve or administer and
consequently no funds. Not being an owning authority, its operations
cannot produce a recompense in the market. It is without funds except
for what it can collect by force. It runs continuously at a deficit which can
only be made up by more taxation, instead of being a self-sustaining
enterprise as is the administration of a capital property by its owners.

5. Incentive. Sovereignty further contrasts with proprietary administra-
tion in its lack of incentive for the improvement of land or other
provision for the public welfare. Since it has no property of its own, every
act of the sovereignty depends upon its taking property from others,
thereby impinging on persons whose good will might be or become a
factor in keeping the public officer in power. Therefore, taxing bodies are
reluctant to act. Unspectacular but necessary public works for which
taxes have been collected in advance, hold no prospect of reward for the
office holder to provide him with positive motivation for their perform-
ance. They represent only danger should they work out badly or draw
criticism. Furthermore, the doing, as in all expenditure of tax funds, may
involve further expropriation in the form of eminent domain or require
the enforcement of regulations under the police power, both with their
attendant risks.

Self-interest dictates that the public administrator spend tax funds in
ways calculated to continue him in office. This is both the safest and his
most rewarding course of action. His motive toward the public interest is
necessarily a negative one— to hold his position— since there is little
opportunity to advance himself by the forthright prosecution of the
public interest as there is in all private business and in proprietary
community organization. As a trustee of funds that are not his own, the
public administrator is committed to a conservative course in terms of
what is acceptable to the electorate. Successful innovation holds no
reward, and failure is worse than merely the financial loss; if discovered,
the administrator is considered guilty of misfeasance. Sovereignty
therefore is a reluctant machinery of public administration that in
serving the public tends always to move from crisis to crisis, rather than
from opportunity to opportunity as in proprietary enterprise.

We can speculate whether the conflict of general and particular
interests under sovereignty may not provide a possible functional
explanation of the prominence of self-sacrifice in Western ethos and
religion. To the extent that it influenced behavior, such an ethos would be
functional for the public good in situations where the public good often

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91

can be secured only by the self-sacrifice of personal interests by private
and public people alike. The demand for sacrificial behavior is apparent
on every hand where public problems are discussed. Professional men
and women are continually importuned to donate their time and skill to
the community. A single example concerns the plight of downtown
business districts. Virtually everything that has been written on the
subject urging a "solution" either calls for sacrificial behavior or else
deplores its lack as uncooperative, selfish, opportunistic, unreasonable,
unsocial, and so forth. On the other hand, civic-mindedness, public spirit,
and social conscience are frequent euphemisms for self-sacrifice in the
interest of the collective welfare. Characteristic is the following state-
ment from an article by a leading developer:

In most cities new powers will be required to carry out the plan. This need not
frighten us. . . . Without the necessary power, unreasonable, uncooperative,
or simply uninterested property owners will endlessly frustrate the finest
efforts to remake the city into what it ought to be. The development and
execution of a bold and effective downtown plan will require the vigorous
and dedicated leadership of merchants, bankers, and the entire business
community. ... It will mean substantial sacrifice by some business and
property owners. '

Self-sacrifice benefits society wherever it alleviates the need of overt
force, with its potentially disruptive effects, being employed in situations
where public policy and private interest collide.

The coincidence of general and particular interests in the proprietary
community, on the other hand, is more than a stimulus toward individual
and collective accomplishment. It also provides a safeguard. As the
proprietor exercises sound judgment in the administration of commu-
nity affairs, his self-interest is served and he finds himself in position to
exercise his judgment over a wider field. As his judgment proves
unsound, its field diminishes until he finds himself no longer in business
at all.

His sovereign counterpart, by contrast, so long as he manages to
control those he can and to please those he cannot otherwise control, and
so long as there remains enough productive enterprise in the community
to support the power structure, can expand his role in virtual disregard of
the public interest. Inefficiency in advancing the community interest is
not penalized. Contrived limitations such as constitutions are attempts to
make the sovereignty limit itself, and as such represent another example
of appeal to the ethos of self-sacrifice. A constitution can be only a paper
limitation in the long run, since its interpretation and its enforcement

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both must be left to the same power it is intended to restrain, there being
none other to speak for the pubUc.

Bad management cannot long be concealed in a proprietary enterprise.
The equities market is sensitive to management decisions and registers
its adverse judgments by declining values. This signal is an invitation to
others to bid into the ownership and restore the enterprise to an efficient
level of operation. The same result need not wait on price signals, even,
since anyone, seeing a way to improve the management of a business,
has an incentive to buy into the ownership or otherwise associate himself
with the venture. In a sovereign structure, on the other hand, there is no
accounting to owners for efficiency of operation and no corresponding
opportunity to remedy or improve management. The result is a rigid
structure marked by gradual deterioration and by intermittent and
violent revolutions. Nor when change does occur, is there anything
fundamental in the nature of the change to suggest the likelihood of
improvement. By contrast, in the proprietary enterprise, those with
sufficient resources to buy into the ownership are likely to be experienced
in business, and each new venture demands and rewards their construc-
tive efforts.

Sovereignty does not follow directly from weak organization any more
than fever in an organism is the direct result of a weak constitution. It is
responsive to crisis situations, which are most likely to develop— whether
from internal or external conditions of stress— in communities that are
least well administered. The crises may be caused by either internal
conditions of stress, such as those mainly dealt with in this book, or by
conditions externally imposed. In either case, if the crises are of short
duration, the force response like the fever subsides. But where crises
continue over a long period, the force response becomes habitual and
self-perpetuating in the community.

Kinship

Kinship in early society serves functions analogous to those of contract
in modern industrial society. Kinship and contract, each in its own
setting, afford alternative bases for recruiting and sorting people into
roles in varying patterns of cooperation.

Roles, just as tasks of any kind, require resources for their perform-
ance. Thus at either level of society, they presuppose the institution of
property. From the infinitude of possible ways of dividing the resources
of the world by the convention of property— limited only by the power of

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93

the imagination to conceive of new uses— people equip themselves for
their tasks by constantly making such divisions and assembling more or
less functional property bundles, or portfolios, to correspond with the
roles they anticipate for themselves.

Systems of roles— social structures— evolve as people relate in coopera-
tive ways to accomplish results they cannot accomplish separately, or as
well. Those structures that achieve continuity by providing for the
regular substitution of new participants to fill its roles as old ones drop
out, are called corporations.

An important event for nineteenth-century social science was the
discovery that not all corporations recruit their members contractually. A
significant number in the world recruit their membership through
kinship systems. These systems, highly sophisticated and complex in
many primitive societies, especially in those societies least affected by
sovereignty, have engaged the major analytic efforts of anthropologists
for over half a century.

Kinship corporations are distinctive not only in their method of
recruitment. They are general-purpose and multifunctional, embracing
both production and consumption. They are designed to accommodate
automatically all of the members of a population, provided only that the
population be sufficiently small (usually less than a thousand members),
stable, and biologically self-perpetuating. Their members, born into the
corporation, occupy sets of roles within it that change as their life-cycles
unfold. Kinship calculus provides by regular rules of marriage and
descent for the orderly succession of property among the members— a
function that kinship systems in truncated form still perform in indus-
trial society.

Until rather recently, as time is measured in evolutionary terms, the
calculus of kinship was the only way of promoting and integrating the
use of resources in human affairs. The tendency of this social technology
to be cumbersome and resistant to change was compensated by the
fiction of adoption and other devices that greatly added to its flexibility.
But the idiom remained refractory and too limiting. The breakthrough in
human social organization occurred when corporations could be assem-
bled by individually negotiated contracts for performance of specific
functions and by recruiting talent without regard for kinship. This
foreshadowed the significant advance from the kinship level of human
community to the contractual level— an evolutionary quantum leap
between two broad planes or levels of social equilibrium. The quantum
leap is still in progress. It seems long when measured against individual

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lifetimes, however brief in evolutionary time. Almost the whole of
written history is the record of the instabilities and confusions
characteristic of a transitional period.

CHAPTER 8

Evolving Society

We may say that the movement of the progressive societies has been a
movement from status to contract.

Sir Henry Maine
Ancient Law

In the light of what is already known, we have examined in this book a
body of data newly available to the social sciences and have generalized
broadly about the nature of communities. These generalizations can be
summarized as follows:

There are certain functional requirements of a community that cannot
adequately be met except through an organized proprietary interest in
land.

Therefore, communities other than those in the proprietary pattern-
including those most typical of the growth and present development of
Western civilization— are not communities of alternate kind. Rather,
they are deficient and incompletely organized departures from the
norm that is represented by the fully organized proprietary community.
In this light, the distinction between state and stateless societies which is
commonly made by anthropologists is significant, though not in the way
it is usually comprehended. For in terms of community structure and
function, states represent not a social advance, but a condition of
relative community disorganization.

Finally, there is in contemporary Western civilization a trend discern-
ible on the local level toward a social reintegration in the proprietary
pattern, a trend that has not sprung from any conscious design but has
proceeded according to its inner organic pattern so far as it has not been
disturbed by the recurrent crises of civic affairs.

The broad generalization is rich in historical suggestion. This chapter
will trace out, from some of the data at our command, an overall picture
or interpretation of history that seems quite consistent if not wholly
implicit in it.

The earliest picture of social man that can be constructed from present
evidence is one of early bands of hunters and gatherers, their members
already observing the propriety of property with respect to their
individual persons, items of personal property, and the lands over which

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they hunted and gathered food. The development of the proprietary
principle with respect to land varied in each case with the particular
ecological adaptation of the group, but the pattern of that development
tended regularly to be one in which the distributive function, so far as it
was required, was entrusted to a senior member of the kin group.

Subsequent progress until very recent centuries came slowly, perhaps
because of the chicken-and-egg dilemma, each factor of a progressive
market economy being dependent in turn on a complex of many others
which were likewise non-existent. Population was too little and transac-
tions too few to constitute an active market on which to predicate new-
product development, even had there been sufficient capital accumula-
tion. Accountancy was rudimentary at best. Perhaps most important—
though it may be doubtful if priority can be assigned— is the fact that the
business firm or its equivalent had not evolved independently of the
family as a specialized productive unit. At least some studies suggest that
without this radical and historically recent development, markets could
never have transcended the level of the peasant bazaar.^

When some of these early bands developed food cultivation and
established permanent communities, the head or eldest of the kin group
readily assumed the administrative functions of village headman. The
new requirements were easily accommodated within the existing social
structure, the basic pattern of which had long been, established. Hence,
the transition from a mobile hfe of hunting and gathering to settled
village life, so long regarded as a major turning point, was actually an
event of minor importance in the evolution of human society. The
significant change occurred much later, in the transition to manorial
forms and institutions, as property and contract differentiated out of
kinship. At that juncture the institution of property and exchange began
developing in the idiom of contract, which differed from kinship's idiom
of the gift by being impersonal and, thereby, potential for becoming
universal. It was destined eventually to transcend the limitations of the
narrow biological group and, for the first time in the natural history of
life, to extend the practice of reciprocity, or mutual aid, to the outer limit
of a species.

Such separation of property from kinship might have been promoted,
as historian Arnold Toynbee suggests, wherever a marine migration had
a tendency, because of the recruitment of boat crews across kinship lines,
to break up existing family ties.^ It may also have been promoted by the
addition to the village of other groups who consented to pay rent or rent
service to the original inhabitants without adopting a kinship relation to
them, the original members becoming thereby a landlord class.

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97

In the settlement of the deha region of the Tigris and Euphrates
rivers, long considered the Garden of Eden of Western civilization,
both factors may have been at work. Archeological findings of recent
years have put the initial settlement of the delta lands at a point of time
in prehistory several thousand years after the basic techniques of
farming had been developed elsewhere in rain-fall areas. Irrigation was
the significant innovation within the already well established technology
of food production that made settlement of the practically rain-free delta
lands possible. Colonization by marine or riverine migrations, with
subsequent arrivals welcomed as recruits to help extend the irrigation
systems, must have contributed to conditions favoring the development
of manorial institutions of which there is much evidence in the early rise
of towns. In the absence of integrating kinship ties, the responsibility for
community administration must naturally have devolved on the leaders
of the migration and have included responsibility for the construction
and maintenance of irrigation systems, financed by customary returns of
rent and services according to benefits conferred.

Unwittingly, however, these early colonists in the delta lands had
ventured into a ecological trap in which, for a later generation, the
development of sovereignty was virtually certain.

As population increased under the high productivity of irrigation
farming and as villages and then towns multiplied along the banks of the
rivers on which they depended for their water, conflicts developed over
the diversion of water by communities upstream that adversely affected
those downstream. From isolated charges and recriminations and
sporadic raiding in the beginning, the conflict intensified under increas-
ing population pressure as more and more vain attempts were made to
restore equilibrium. The proprietary-community pattern may have been
fully developed within each town, but the crisis stemmed from the
divisions of land administration within the now more inclusive area. The
gradually rising level of hostihties was paralleled within each community
by the growing need for defensive preparations. The critical point was
passed when the warrior role became institutionalized in a standing war
organization within one or more of the communities instead of continu-
ing ad hoc, relegated outside of normal community life, according to the
pattern observed to prevail among communities of stateless societies
throughout the world.

Thus the precondition of sovereignty in the delta region of the Tigris
and Euphrates need not have been, as Karl Wittfogel and some other
writers have suggested, the need of the communities for public-works
programs." According to that view, a village facing the need of construct-

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ing heavy land improvements such as irrigation systems had to evolve
sovereignty in order to levy the needed labor force from the local
population. Later on, the control of these very facilities enabled the
sovereign authority to continue its oppressive hold on the population.
The alternative view is that sovereignty arose after the towns were
already long established in the use of irrigation systems. It arose in
response to a deficiency of regional administration reflecting the
fragmentation of land authority among the diff'erent towns, a situation
which became increasingly critical with the extension of irrigation and
increased use of water, until the spark of sovereignty ignited in one or
more of the towns. This hypothesis is consistent with the archeological
evidence that kingship, rather than coinciding with the beginnings of the
urban revolution, developed after it was already well advanced in the
manorial pattern— the centers of administration being the temples, the
lands of each town being owned nominally by the god of that town and
administered by the temple officials as the stewards of the estate.
Temples were the administrative centers of an economic nature long
before kingly palaces appear in the archeological record. '

Once established in Mesopotamia, the condition of sovereignty spread
rapidly over the rest of the Near East by a kind of chain reaction. The
reaction need not have involved conquest in every case. For sovereignty
presents not an occasional or sporadic threat to a neighboring people,
but a continuing danger that can only be met by sustained readiness for
defense. If not immediately overwhelmed, the neighboring community
must in time take on its own sovereign hue. The process doubtless was
hastened by the outward show attending the persons of warriors and
rulers. Such display tends always to impress neighboring peoples and to
make their own institutions seem less by comparison, at the same time
that it touches the ambitions of the restless.

Other examples besides the Sumerian experience illustrate the crisis
that precipitates sovereignty out of pre-state conditions. Such was the
experience of the Cherokee villages of the first half of the eighteenth
century. When that century opened, the Cherokee occupied some thirty-
five to forty villages ranging in size from 350 to 500 people each,
distributed through the Great Smoky Mountains at the juncture of
present-day North and South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee. The
villages were wholly autonomous. They enjoyed a common language and
general traditions and frequently joined in fighting against common
enemies, but the aff"airs of each were decided solely within each village.
Warfare was endemic among the Indian groups with whom the Cherokee
were in contact, especially the Creek and Shawnee to the south and north.

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99

and all were supplied with arms by the English in Charles Town.
Occasionally, incidents occurred with the English traders. These circum-
stances set the stage for the drama that ensued. The English, acting as if
the Cherokee were a nation like themselves under a king, adopted the
policy after 1730 of responding to incidents by imposing an arms
embargo on all of the Cherokee, while continuing to supply arms to their
enemies. This made every Cherokee vulnerable to the consequences of
the hot-headed acts of individuals entirely unrelated to them and living
in a village possibly sixty miles away. The anguish of the Cherokee
people during several decades as they struggled against the seeming
impossibility of handling this crisis by any means consistent with their
traditional concepts of right behavior, is documented in an ethnohistoric
study by anthropologist Frederick Gearing.' Eventually, a standing war
organization was formed, in direct opposition to the values of Cherokee
life. The new state was symbolized by the completion in 1761 of a brick
jail. It was publicized among the villages that, in the event of an incident
with the English, a war party would be sent after those involved to bring
them back and hold them in the jail until the English came for them.

While circumstances differed in the Cherokee case, the nature of the
crisis was similar to that which had faced the Sumerian towns. The
action which needed to be coordinated was not the use of water in
irrigation, but the treatment of Englishmen who penetrated their
territory. The resource on which Cherokee life depended was in this
case not water, but weapons.

The Cherokee example and other instances which might be cited
from the growing record of anthropology help us to understand better
the original crisis that must have precipitated the sovereignty which
dominates our Western tradition. The time and circumstances of
similar occurrences in the New World, and perhaps also independently
in India and China, are the subject of continuing study in archeology.

During the greater part of the period of sovereignty in the Western
World, now lasting more than five millenia, the functions of property in
land became largely confused and obscured. There were exceptions; a
single example is the development of manorialism which evidently
followed the Anglo-Saxon migrations into England, culminating in the
Alfredian Renaissance before it was subverted and finally overthrown
by Norman influence and force of arms. Similar social arrangements
evolved elsewhere. As more becomes known about the civilizations of
Africa, we find a wealth of evidence of manorial institutions there.
Japan is a fertile field for study. These developments and others like

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them did not last. In northern Europe, the relation of landlord and
tenant became that of baron and serf in the development of govern-
ments consciously patterned on the model of Rome.

But developments over the long period of sovereignty were not
insignificant for the eventual appearance, almost unnoticed, of proprie-
tary community forms in modern commercial real estate. For gradually,
in the successions of civilization leading up to the present, a market
economy evolved and men became more sophisticated in the handling of
property of other kinds than land. Entrepreneurs studied mathematics
and devised means of numerical accountancy, including, notably,
double-entry bookkeeping. There grew up a market technology consist-
ing of methods of transfer of credit, banking, insurance, corporate
structure, and all the instruments and usages necessary to modern
business. This modern sophistication in handling property of other kinds
than land was a necessary precondition for the recent growth of
commercial real estate.

A second major precondition besides the accumulation of market
technology, was the development in Western Europe of free trade in land
following the revolutions of the eighteenth century. This came about in
two parts. First, the revolutions themselves had the effect of purging land
ownership of the sovereignty with which it had become closely identified
by divorcing the landed nobility from government without, in most cases,
taking their land. Sovereignty stripped from them, the landed nobility
were left with the status of private persons owning land. This was
perhaps the single most significant development preparing the way for
the full industrial revolution and the modern era. The loosening of land
ownership from the rules of primogeniture rapidly followed, so that land
could be bought and sold exactly as other kinds of property. Throughout
Europe, one of the outstanding achievements of the eighteenth century
was free trade in land. The same pattern followed in the New World
where, with the extension of franchise and the democratization of
government, landowners as such found themselves divorced from the
sovereignty and the tax power and dependent on administering their
land in the market for their sole revenues.

Such were the antecedents of modern real estate. In the rising demand
for land that accompanied the industrial revolution, land was bought and
sold speculatively, and landlords collected what rents the market offered
without understanding their role or the reason why rents came to them.
Landowners themselves accepted the charge of John Stuart Mill and
Henry George that rent was "unearned increment." Almost the sole
function of land ownership in the nineteenth century and the first

Evolving Society

101

decades of the twentieth was distributive; the market in land afforded,
through a pricing system, a flexible and equitable means of allocating
sites and resources and thereby fulfilled a prime functional requisite of
community life. Visible improvements such as roads and utilities, which
contribute to the value of land served by them and therefore account for
a substantial part of such rents as landowners receive, were financed not
by the landowners but by taxes, even though the taxes were chiefly levied
on land.

In the twentieth century, land owners have begun to assume responsi-
bility for some of the public improvements of land, both in residential
subdivisions intended to be sold off" as individual lots and in develop-
ments such as shopping centers intended to remain under whole owner-
ship. Shopping centers, for example, are providing many of the services
normally performed by municipal agencies in the older retail districts.
These include parking, roads, lighting, landscaped common areas, police
and fire protection, storm sewers, and in some cases, sewage disposal.

Such a development has become increasingly necessary as sovereignty
has failed to meet the advancing demand. In 1956 the Society of
Residential Appraisers summarized the situation:

In both the United States and Canada, land development has been tradition-
ally a matter for local governments. Ground services were installed under
municipal direction and financed either by general levies on real property or
by local improvement charges against the specific properties benefiting from
the development. . . .

Until the postwar period, there was little reason to disturb this arrangement.
Areas improved in advance of need sufficed for most development of the
1920's. . . . Therefore, both countries entered the postwar period with a fund
of "available serviced land," and also with the idea that such a fund of idle
improved land was normal.

The fund was quickly exhausted. Problems of organization and finance
rendered many municipaUties incapable of coping with the required growth.

Meanwhile, some municipalities have continued to provide services in the
traditional way, but an increasing number in both countries have shifted the
financing to the subdivider, to be paid for in the price of his lots or houses.

A recent survey of the Urban Land Institute of U. S. cities of 50,000
population and over shows that two-thirds of them require the developer to
provide the services in this manner.

Land owners are progressively assuming responsibility for servicing
new land. As yet, the prevailing practice where sale of sites is contem-
plated is to dedicate the completed facilities such as streets and storm

102

The Art of Community

sewers to the sovereignty to maintain, although there is experimentation
in new subdivisions with condominium organization whereby the
common facilities are maintained by an association of surrounding
owners. The trend over the long term, however, is for land owners not
only to build improvements into land, but more and more to assume
continuing responsiblility for their operation and maintenance by
holding their interest in the whole development intact.

The significance of these developments for the long term is that they
seem to herald, on some perhaps-not-so-distant horizon, the end of the
period of sovereignty— that unstable transition between the broad
kinship-based level of social organization and the next plateau of social
integration in terms of contract. The auspicious beginnings here are the
growth of multiple-occupancy income properties— proprietary communi-
ties—commencing not on a large scale or conceived in ambitious social
plans, but almost inconspiciously in countless small beginnings: shop-
ping centers, industrial estates, apartments, mobile-home communities,
and real-estate complexes on the order of Rockefeller and Prudential
Centers and Century City. The potential in these small beginnings is that
they will grow, not only in numbers but also as seed crystals, as
Rockefeller Center has grown, expanding to include adjacent sites by
purchase or by offer of participation as the land administration becomes
sufficiently productive to j ustif y it.

A novel proposal for a private approach to urban redevelopment
might also one day prove its worth and augment these beginnings.
Architect Arthur C. Holden of New York suggested in the 1930's that
instead of outside interests assembling blighted properties in downtown
areas by purchase, which requires almost prohibitive amounts of capital
when it can be done at all, the existing multiple land owners within an
area might form an owning and managing corporation for that area and
pool their separate titles at appraised values in exchange for equivalent
undivided shares in the whole. The resulting corporation would find itself
owning an extremely valuable piece of property which could be pledged
to secure funds for its redevelopment. With financing available from
conventional sources, no money investment would be required of the
owners, nor any expenditure of taxes by the public, for the replanning
and redevelopment of the assembled area. Because the value of the
assembled property would exceed the sum value of the parts before
pooling (being now of an economic size for redevelopment), each
owner's equity would be correspondingly greater. In addition, it would be
more liquid. Each would have traded an uncertain interest in a blighted
area for a secure share in a productive enterprise.

Evolving Society

103

Mr. Holden wrote in his proposal:

In September, 1666, when the great fire of London laid the heart of that city
in ashes. Sir Christopher Wren offered a plan that might have made London
City the most efficient municipality of the modern world. His plan was not
carried out, partly because it was said that there was no available fund large
enough to finance the work, but principally because the merchants who had
suffered the loss quite naturally insisted that their homes and places of
business should be re-erected as quickly as possible upon the sites over which
they controlled the rights.

Almost the same story followed most of the conflagrations that have
destri^ved the physical hearts of many modern cities. . . .

No one disputes the desirability of a planned physical re-building. Men have
failed, however, to visualize the rebuilding of existing complicated contrac-
tual relationships. The merchants of London thought they had no funds to
draw on because they looked in the wrong direction. The resources needed
for reconstruction can be commanded only by the expected earning power of
the redeveloped areas. Credit is based upon belief in the future, upon
reasonable assumptions as to possible accomplishment, upon the vision and
integrity of men who look to the future and plan for the future.

Each successful multiple-occupancy income property in real estate,
beside comprising a community, is a growing island of profitable
proprietary administration, a point of health in the world social fabric.
As these small beginnings, growing in number and in size, approach one
another, they will tend increasingly to merge their interests whenever the
prospect of economy in administration or improved service for the
tenants makes it advantageous for all concerned to do so. They will not
be hindered, as were primitive proprietary communities, by lack of ways
to reconcile their ownerships. The primitive world not only lacked such
flexible means of adjustment as are afforded by modern appraisal
techniques, venture vehicles, and securities markets, but merger might
have been even less feasible in the Sumerian instance because of the
identification of the landed interest in each place with its exclusive
religious institution and tutelary god.

A main theme of this book has been that the period of sovereignty is
but the unstable transition between two levels of human social organiza-
tion—the kinship level and the contractual. On both levels, the structure
and organization are proprietary.

Property in land was first institutionalized in the kinship organization
of the hunting and food-gathering band, which recognized as spokesman
for the group a senior member. It was he who performed the land
distributive function so far as there was need. Thus did property in land

104

The Art of Community

evolve, in the idiom of kinship, within small population groups or sub-
groups with relatively stable membership.

As technology and environmental conditions in some places permitted
larger and impersonal aggregations of population, the recognition of
property in land came to be practiced beyond the range of kinship ties
and obligations. This impersonalization of land marked the manorial
community, the first emergence of a contractual form of proprietary
community in a world still largely ordered in kinship terms. This was a
significant event, but it would be long before conditions would be such
that it could come into its own. In the modern world, the signs are just
beginning.

Numerous examples surviving in the world today illustrate manorial
institutions. One instance are the Mambwe people of Northen Rhodesia,
of whom anthropologist William Watson writes:

The chief nominally "owns" all the land in his chieftaincy, and in return for
giving it to his subjects to cultivate, they return him obedience and respect. In
Gluckman's terms, these subjects have "estates of holding." The chief grants
rights to each village headman, who in turn grants his villagers rights in
village land. Each person granted such rights in the hierarchy has duties and
obligations of a similar kind to the holder from whom he obtained his
particular rights to the use of the land. A Mambwe who is dissatisfied with the
rule of one chief is at liberty to move to another chieftaincy, and provided he
can find a headman who will take him into his village, wiH be granted rights
to the use of land by the chief and headman in return for obedience and
recognition. These rules apply to strangers, who are welcomed and encou-
raged to settle on the land. . . .

. . . the commoners must be treated with care and their interests consulted, or
the headman will lose them to a more just and generous title-holder. The
commoners depend on a title-holder for rights to cultivate land, for justice
and for the performance of rituals upon which depend the fertility of both
land and people. The personality of a headman is therefore an important
factor in determining the size and prosperity of a village, for if he cannot
satisfy his villagers, they will leave him and go elsewhere.* He must be
circumspect and tactful in all his dealings. '

A strength of both kinds of early community, kinship and manorial,
was their unitary land authority. But the primitive world was host to
many communities, each constituting a separate division of such author-
ity. In the course of time, owing to the general increase in population
after the rise of agriculture and to the uneven distribution of arable land

*A native African expression describes the chief who has so far mismanaged his village as
to lose all his villagers. It is said that such a chief is left alone in his village to be "Chief of the
Pumpkins."

Evolving Society

105

in the world, it was not unlikely that a number of communities would
grow up in close proximity and their combined area take on the aspect of
a larger or composite community with fragmented land interests.
Confronted by a common circumstance requiring them to coordinate
some aspect of their behavior, and depending on the severity of that
circumstance, the several communities would face a crisis of administra-
tion. The primitive institution of property was little developed to cope
with this difficult situation.

Within each successive rise of civilization, as the growth of population
and specialization brought increasing interdependence of land uses, the
lack of any plan or coordination gradually became critical. The mount-
ing crises led to apathy or else provoked ever greater efforts to resolve
them. Sovereignty, the power of expropriation, seemed the only recourse;
but it was, at best, palliative. As it relieved the symptoms to prolong the
life of the community, the points of conflict multiplied. Thus was
sovereignty stimulated until its activity exceeded the ability of the
productive community to sustain it. Yet, paradoxically, the community
supported the sovereignty in order to continue to live. So progress
brought its own decline, and the administration of cities and states
lapsed in disorder and default.

While contemporary civilization hitherto has traced the same tiresome
and tragic course, the future is by no means as certain. Experience gained
in the commercial/industrial revolution in handling property of many
kinds has provided institutions for a similarly productive administration
of property in land. A new social capability, an authentic art of
community, already has emerged in tens of thousands of small begin-
nings. Its successes are attracting both the capital and the organizational
resources of the developed industrial sector of the economy. Might not
these beginnings contain the empirical seed of a new social integration
which will ultimately permit men to be truly creative in their community
affairs as they have begun to be in their material world, therein
producing new environments appropriate to the infinite process of
differentiation— and, with this, the ever increasing potential for fulfilling
association— of the individual human spirit?

References

Chapter 1

Is the Hotel a Community?

1 . George A. Hillery, "Definition of Community— Areas of Agreement," Rural
Sociology, June 1955, p. 111.

2. Conrad Arensberg, "The Community Study Method," The American Journal
of Sociology, September 1954, p. 124.

3. A. R. Radclilfe-Brown, A Natural Science of Society (Glencoe, 111.: Free
Press, 1957), p. 114.

Chapter 2,
Historical Briefs

1. Ursula B. Stone, "Hotels," Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York:
Macmillan Co., 1932) VII, p. 473.

2. Jefferson Williamson, The American Hotel: An Anecdotal History (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930), p. 125.

3. Victor Gruen, "Twelve Check Points for Regional Planned Center,"
Women's Wear Daily, 28 December 1953, p. 35.

4. Leon W. Ellwood and Robert H. Armstrong, "Shops, Stores and Shopping
Centers, Part 4," Appraisal Journal, October 1952, p. 475.

5. Architectural Forum, August 1950, p. 107.

6. Richard L. Nelson, The Selection of Retail Locations (New York: F. W.
Dodge, 1958), p. 276.

7. Stores, January 1958, p. 15.

8. J. Ross McKeever, "Shopping Centers Restudied," Urban Land Institute
Technical Bulletin No. 50 (1957), p. 69.

9. "The Planned Industrial District, A Symposium," Architectural Forum, April
1954, p. 110.

10. Theodore K. Pasma, Organized Industrial Districts— A Tool for Community
Development (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1954), p. 1.

11. Gilbert J. Hardman, "The Industrial Estate and the Community," News
Bulletin of the Institute of Public Administration of Canada, August 1957, p.
27

12. W. N. Mitchell and M. J. Jucius, "Industrial Districts of the Chicago Region
and Their Influence on Plant Location," Journal of Business, April 1933, p.
140.

13. Hardman, loc. cit.

108

The Art of Community

14. Richard L. Nelson and Frederick T. Aschman, Real Estate and City
Planning {Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1957), p. 356.

15. James R. Lee and Gilbert K. H. Wong, An Analysis of Organized Industrial
Districts (Menlo Park, Calif.: Stanford Research Institute, 1958), p. 24.

16. Richard T. Murphy and William L. Baldwin, "Business Moves to the
Industrial Park," Harvard Business Review, May 1959, p. 79.

17. A. W. Krebs, Jr., "Trends in Industrial Parks," Industrial Development, June

1959, p. 45.

18. Richard U. Ratcliff, Urban Land Economics (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1949), p. 415.

19. Pasma, Op. Cit., p. 62.

20. N. C. Hudson, "Chicago's Clearing Industrial District Pioneers Principle of
Industrial Zoning," Traffic World, 5 August 1950, p. 58.

21. Richard M. Hallet, Jr., "New Lure for Districts," Industrial Development,
February 1959, pp. 11, 14.

22. Murphy and Baldwin, op. cit., p. 88.

23. Douglas P. Wells, Vice President, as quoted by N. C. Hudson, loc. cit.

24. George W. Cox, "The Role of Railroads in Industrial District Develop-
ment," Urban Land, February 1958, p. 2.

25. Adapted from Robert E. Boley, "Industrial Districts Restudied," Urban
Land Institute Technical Bulletin No. 41 (1961), Table 1, p. 30, and
David A. Smith, "An Analysis of American Industrial Parks" (Master's
Thesis, Clark University, 1968), Table 3, p. 22.

26. Zenon S. Malinowski and William N. Kinnard, The Flace of Small Business
in Planned Industrial Districts (Storrs, Conn.: University of Connecticut,
1963), p. 108.

27. American Society of Planning Officials, Information Report No. 84, March
1956, p. 4.

28. For an excellent historical review, see Frederick H. Bair, Jr., Mobile Homes
and the General Housing Supply; Past, Present and Outlook (Chicago:
Mobile Homes Manufacturers' Association, 1969).

29. Ethel Kienz, "Choosing a Mobile Home Park," Consumer Bulletin, March
1969, pp. 21-23.

30. H. L. Banholomew, "Operating a Trailer Park," Urban Land, December

1960, pp. 5-6.

31. The Mobile Homes Manufacturers' Association in 1968 counted 22,000
sanitary district permits for mobile home parks nationwide. However, this
figure is known to contain many uses which are not properly parks. Woodall's
Directory of Mobile Home Parks in 1962 contained 16,179 listings.

32. H. A. Bruno & Associates, Inc., FactSheet~59th National Boat Show (New
York), January 1969.

33. Boley, op. cit., p. 18.

34. Dorothy Thompson, "A New Look for Commercialism," Architectural
Forum, November 1954, p. 156. Excerpted from her regular column in
Ladies' Home Journal, June 1954, p. 11.

References

109

Chapter 3

Trends in the Real Estate Industry

1. Marc J. Feldstein and Lyle C. Bryant, "Organization of Occupancy as an
Approach to Real Estate Management," Journal of Land and Public Utility
Economics, November 1941, p. 461.

2. Stanley L. McMichael, How to Operate a Real Estate Business (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1947), p. 4.

3. Garnett Laidlaw Eskew, Of Land and Men (Washington, D.C.: Urban Land
Institute, 1959), p. 10.

4. "The Planned Industrial District, A Symposium," Architectural Forum, April
1954, p. 110.

5. National Association of Home Builders, Land Planning Committee, Home
Builders' Manual for Land Development (Washington, D.C.: National
Assocation of Home Builders, 1958), pp. 234-248.

6. "The Planned Industrial District," loc. cit.

7. Frederick M. Babcock, The Valuation of Real Estate (New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1932), p. 129.

8. E. F. Hutton and Company, Market and Business Survey, November 1960,
p. 2.

9. Ratcliff, loc. cit.

10. "Exchange Park at Dallas Is a City Within a City," Manufacturers' Record,
December 1956, p. 9.

11. International Council of Shopping Centers, Fact Sheet, 1 May 1969.

12. James C. Downs, "The Meaning of Management Today," Journal of
Property Management, September 1953, p. 36. This journal is published by
the Institute of Real Estate Management of the National Association of
Real Estate Boards, Chicago, Illinois.

13. Edgardo Contini at the Aspen Design Conference, as reported in Victor
Gruen and Larry Smith, Shopping Towns USA (New York: Reinhold,
1960), p. 271.

Chapter 5

Structure and Function

1. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Part 1 (New York: P. F. Collier and
Son, 1901), p. 369.

2. Nelson and Aschman, op. cit., p. 381.

3. Benjamin Swig, "How the Picture has Changed for Real Estate as an
Investment," Journal of Property Management, December 1958, p. 69.

4. Harold C. Narrow, "In the Ring: Center vs. Center," Journal of Property
Management, June 1959, p. 235.

110

The Art of Community

5. Richmond, California, City Planning Commission, Commercial Development
in Richmond, 16 January 1958.

6. Ratcliff, op. cit., p. 6.

7. Ibid., p. 2S3.

8. "$27-million 'Empire Central' Set by Windsor Properties," Manufacturers'
Record, January 1958, p. 10.

9. Ernest B. Horwath and Louis Toth, Hotel Accounting (New York: Ronald
Printing Company, 1948), p. 4.

10. James C. Downs, Jr., Principles of Real Estate Management (Chicago:
Institute of Real Estate Management, 1964), p. 300.

Chapter 6

Comparisons With Primitive Community

1. Melville J. Herskovits, Economic Anthropology: A Study in Comparative
Economics (New York: Knopf, 1952), p. 369. For a thoughtful and
informative book on land tenure worldwide, see Vincent Liversage, Land
Tenure in the Colonies (London: Cambridge University Press, 1945).

2. For a rare ethnographic description of a concerted program of community
planning at the village community level, see I. Schapera, "The Social
Structure of the Tswana Ward," Bantu Studies, September 1935, p. 111.

3. Bernard Gallin, "A case for Intervention in the Field," Human Organization,
Fall 1959, p. 141.

4. PhiUp Drucker, Indians of the Northwest Coast (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1955), p. 116.

5. For a functional interpretation of the potlatch, see Spencer H. MacCallum,
Art of the Northwest Coast (Princeton: The Art Museum, Princeton
University, 1969), pp. 10-11.

6. See Raymond Firth, Primitive Polynesian Economy (London: Routledge &
Sons, 1939), p. 222.

Chapter 7

The Nature of Community Organization

1. Spencer Heath, Citadel, Market and Altar (Baltimore: Science of Society
Foundation, 1957), p. 235.

2. National Association of Home Builders, op. cit., p. 22.

3. See, for example, James C. Downs, Jr., op. cit., pp. 217-220.

4. V. Gordon Childe, The Prehistory of European Society (Harmondsworth,
Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1958). See page 84 and elsewhere, especially
Chapter 6, "The Urban Revolution in the Orient."

5. James W. Rouse, "Will Downtown Pace Up to Its Future?" Urban
Land, February 1957, p. 4.

References

111

Chapter 8
Evolving Society

1. Sir Henry Maine, Ancient Law (London: Dent and Sons, 1917), p. 100.

2. Sol Tax, Penny Capitalism: A Guatemalan Indian Economy (Washington,
D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, Institute of Social Anthropology, 1953).

3. Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1934), II, pp. 88, 97. See also B. S. Phillpotts, Kindred and Clan (Cam-
bridge: University Press, 1913), p. 265.

4. Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1957).

5. Robert W. Adams, "The Origin of Cities," Scientific American, September
1960.

6. Frederick O. Gearing, Priests and Warriors; Social Structures for Cherokee
Politics in the 18th Century (Menasha, Wise: American Anthropological
Assocation, Memoir 93, 1962).

7. Society of Residential Appraisers, "Land Development in Expanding
Municipalities," The Review, August 1956, p. 19.

8. Arthur C. Holden. "Technique for Urban Redevelopment, Part II: Combina-
tion and Large-Scale Initiative in Real Estate," Journal of Land and Public
Utility Economics, August 1944, p. 238. For his detailed proposal, see
"Group Action," Land Usage (Publication of the Land Utilization Commit-
tee of the New York Building Congress), April-May 1936.

9. William Watson, Tribal Cohesion in a Money Economy: A Study of the
Mambwe People of Northern Rhodesia (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1958), pp. 19, 90. This volume was published on behalf of the
Rhodes-Livingstone Institute.

I

Index

Addison Industrial District, 24
Africa, 99, 104
Airlawn Industrial Park, 22
Airplane, 4, 51, 53
Alfredian Renaissance, 99
Allen, James B., 36
Anglo-Saxons, 99

Annacis Island Industrial Estate, 25
Anthropology, 1, 3, 4, 5 {See also
Social science)

bridge to, 3
Apartment building, 4, 44, 52
Appraisal, 45
Arensberg, Conrad, 3
Art of community, 1, 66, 105
Aschman, Frederick T., 56
Asia, 71, 99
Associations, 66, 80-81

tenants', 17-18, 66

home owners', 24, 31
Austin, John, 86
Authority, 88-89
Avoidance relations, 5

Babcock, Frederick M., 45
Baldwin, William L., 23, 26
Bergen County Industrial Terminal,
25

Boating, 34

Bouton, Edward H., 15, 41, 42, 44
Buffalo Stader Hotel, 1 1
Bryant, Lyle C, 39
Bus, 51

Bush Terminal, 21

California City, 47

Campground and trailering park, 4,

29, 33
Canada, 34, 47, 101
Capital, organization of, 47, 79
Card playing, 77
Celibacy, 80

Central business district, 56-59, 84-85

Central Manufacturing District, 21

Century City, 47, 102

Cheating, 77

Cherokee, 98, 99

Chieftain (See Village headman)

Childe, V. Gordon, 89

China, 8, 99

Cities, 1, 32, 49, 52, 56-59, 84-85, 91

(See also Subdivision)
City Hotel, 9

Civilization (See Western civiliza-
tion)

Clearing Industrial District, 21, 26,
27

Commercialism, 36
Commune, 3, 120

Community (See also Proprietary
community)

administrative checks, 91-92

art of, 1, 66, 105

as unit of social science, 3

bases of organization, 2, 75

classes of, 49-53

condominium, 49, 52, 83

continuum of types, 79-84

cooperative, 73, 80, 83

defective models, 1

defined, 3-4

examples:

airplane, 4, 51, 53
apartment house, 4, 44, 52
bus, 5 1

city, 1, 32, 49, 52, 56-59, 84-85,

91 (i'ee a/i'o Subdivision)
company town, 36
factory, 50, 52
home, 4, 51, 52
hotel, 2-5, 7-14, 17, 51, 52
industrial estate, 21-28, 52
loft building, 7, 45
marina, 33-34
mart building, 7
medical clinic, 33
mobile home park, 28-33
motel, 13-14, 30

114

The Art of Community

'new towns,' 34, 46-47, 52
office building or center, 4, 33,
45, 51

real estate complex, 33, 46, 52
religious commune, 2, 80
restaurant, 4, 52, 53
science research center, 33
ship, 4, 53

shopping center, 15-20, 47, 51,

52
store, 52
theater, 4, 51-53

trailering park, campground, 4,

29, 33
train. 4, 13, 51, 53
village community, 52, 53, 69-
74, 96 {See also Cooperative)

functional requirements of, 3, 63-
67, 70-71, 95

health of, 46, 50, 67

intermittent, 5 1-53

non-rental, 49-50

pathology of, 75, 95

role of owner, 63-67 {See also Ten-
ant selection. Land planning.
Leadership, village commu-
nity)

subdivided, 24, 31-32, 49, 52, 55-
59, 78-79, 83, 86-87, 91

subsidized, 10-1 1, 20. 27-28, 35-36,
49-50, 53

variables, 4

within communities, 4
Company town, 36
Competition, 16, 26
Condominium, 49, 52, 83
Conejo Valley, 47
Constitutions, 91-92
Contract, 4-5, 75, 77, 92-93, 95
Cooperative, 73, 80, 83
Corporation, 93
Country Club Plaza, 15, 41
Covenants {See Land use controls)
Creativity, 28
Crisis, 57, 105

Demsetz, Harold, 76
Don Mills, 34, 47

Douglas, James B., 17
Downs, James C. Jr., 47, 65
Downtown, 56-59, 84-85, 91
Durkheim, Emile, 50

Elk Grove Village, 34
Empire Central, 47, 64
England, 9, 12, 21, 99, 103
Environment, 79 {See also Real es-
tate industry: object of)
manufacture of, 48, 50, 72
relation to site value, 56, 63-64, 72,
78

Evolution, 32
societal, 93, 95-105
levels of, 93, 102, 103
Exchange Park, 46-47
Exile, 70

Factory, 50, 52

Federal Housing Administration, 16,
83

Feldstein, Marc J.. 39
Firth, Raymond, 70
Flexibility, 32, 36, 50, 59, 84-85

in land use, 22-24, 32, 87
Force, 75, 77, 89

nature of, 85-86
Ford, Henry, 1 1
France, 8

Gallin, Bernard, 71

Gearing, Frederick O., 99

George, Henry, 100

Gift, 72, 96

Gluckman, Max, 104

Government, effects of, 16, 21, 30,
40, 71, 83, 99 {See also Sover-
eignty)

Gruen, Victor, 15

Hardman, Gilbert J., 23, 43
Harmon, William E., 40
Headman {See Village headman)
Heath, Spencer, 76

Index

115

Herskovitz, Melville, 69

Highland Park Shopping Village, 15

Hillery, George 3

Holden, Arthur Cort, 102

Home, 4, 51, 52

ownership, 32, 44
Hopi, 72

Horwath, Ernest, 65

Hotel (See also Inns, Motels)

as community, 2-5, 51, 52

history, 7-14

service, 8-10, 17
Hsin Hsing, 71
Hudson, J. L. Company, 36
Hutton, E. F. and Company, 45

Incentive, 72-74, 90
India, 99
Individual, 105
Industrial estate, 21-28, 52
Industrial park, 22 (See also Indus-
trial estate)
Industrial revolution, 47, 96, 100, 105
Industry City, 2 1
Inn, 7-10, 12-14
Innovation, 28
Irrigation, 97-98
Irvine Ranch, 47

Janns Brothers, 15
Japan, 99
Jesus, 75
Jucius, M. J., 22

Kingship, 98
Kinnard, William N., 28
Kmship. 75, 92-94, 96, 103-104
Kitimat, 47

Laguna Niguel, 34, 47
Land (See also Leasehold, Real es-
tate industry. Subdivision)
as capital, 47, 79

conflict of interests, 55-57, 116-
117. 86-87

controls. 42-44
associations. 24
covenants. 23-24. 42-43
leasehold. 23. 43-44
performance standards, 23
tenant selection, 23 (See also

Land planning)
zonmg, 30, 42-43, 71

free trade in eighteenth century,
100

interest of landowners, 55
planning, 15, 22. 25-26. 35-36, 37,

57, 63-65, 71
redevelopment, 32. 91. 102-103
reform, 71

specializations of use, 79, 86

speculation, 32, 39, 40

value, 15, 23, 41, 42, 45. 56-58, 63-
64, 78 (See also Land plan-
ning. Land controls)
Leadership. 17-18. 20. 57, 59, 63, 66,
71

Leasehold. 23, 24, 26, 28, 32, 43-44,
47

Lee, James, 23
Loft building, 7. 45
London. 9. 12, 103
Lorillard, Squire, 41

Maine, Sir Henry Sumner, 95
Malinowski, Zenon S., 28
Mambwe, 104

Management (See Property manage-
ment)
Manhattan, 58
Manorialism, 96, 104
Marina, 33-34
Market, 59ff". 96
McMichael, Stanley. 40
Medical clinic, 33
Mesopotamia, 97-98. 103
Military. 97
Mill, John Stuart, 100
Mitchell, W. N., 22
Mobile home, 28-29, 33
Mobile home park, 28-33
Modular housing, 29, 30, 44
Money, 62

116

The Art of Community

Montgomery Ward, 16
Morality, 86
Motel, 13-14, 30
Mowbray, John, 42
Murphy, Richard, 23, 26

Nelson, Richard L., 17, 56
New England, 9
"New towns," 34, 46-47, 52
Nichols, Jesse Clyde, 15, 41
Noah's Ark Principle, 17
Nobility, 100
Northgate, 16-17

North Kansas City Industrial Dis-
trict, 2 1
Northland, 16, 36-37
Northwest Coast, 71

Office building, 4, 45, 51
Office center, 33

Ownership, 44, 47, 69. 76, 85 (See
also Contract, Property, Prop-
erty in land)

Pathology, social, 50, 83
Penn Central Railroad, 27
Police, 66

Pollution control, joint economies in,
27

Polo, Marco, 8

Polynesia. 72

Potter, Hugh. 15, 41

Prather, Hugh, 15, 41

Prehistory, 95-98

Primogeniture, 100

Profit motive, 27-28. 35-37. 72 [See
also Subsidy)

Progress, 47, 96 (See also Industrial
revolution. Profit motive)

Property (See also Kinship, Con-
tract)
defined, 60, 76

observed by early man, 95-96
principle of, 76

systematic infringements of, 86

Property in land (See also Land and
related headings)

function, 84, 100-101

nature of, 78-79

origin, 95-96, 103-104
Property management, 7, 19, 30-31,
35-36, 39, 45-46, 47-48

in the primitive world, 69ff
Proprietary community, 5, 55

administration contrasted with so-
vereignty, 88-90

bridge between sociology, anthro-
pology, 3

classification, 7, 49-53

comparison of primitive with mod-
ern forms, 69-74

continuum to fully developed, 81-
84

economy of, 59-62

generalized, 49, 53 (See also "New
towns," Real estate com-
plexes)

health of, 46, 50. 67

role of owner, 63-67. 71 (See also
Tenant selection. Land plan-
ning. Leadership)

self regulation. 91-92

self-sustaining, 50

society in microcosm, 59

speciahzed, 7, 53

structure and function, 52-67

trends, 7, 35, 46
Prudential Center, 47, 102
Pumpkins, Chief of the, 104

Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 4
Ratclitfe, Richard U., 24, 46, 60, 64
Real estate complex, 33. 46. 52
Real estate industry, 35-36 (See also
Environment, Land, Property
management)
history, 39-48, 100-101
land as capital, 71, 79
nature of, 48

objective of, 27, 48, 50, 63, 72
preconditions for modern growth
of, 100

Index

117

role of property management, 19
technological development of, 47-
48

Religious commune, 2, 80
Rent, 62
contrasted with taxes, 89
functional correspondence in

primitive society, 72
management incentive, 72
Research park {See Science research

center)
Restaurant, 4, 52, 53
Retail trade statistics, 47, 58
Revolutions, 92, 100 {See also Indus-
trial revolution)
Right, 86

River Oaks Shopping Center, 15, 41
Riverside, lUinois, 41
Rockefeller Center, 33, 102
Roland Park, 15, 41, 42
Role, 62, 88, 92-93 {See also Com-
munity, role of owner)
Rome, 8, 100
Roosevelt Field, 24, 47
Rouse, James W., 91

Sacrificial ethic, 90-91

Science, 1 {See also Social sciences)

Science City, 47

Science research center, 33

Sears, Roebuck and Company, 16

Sectional housing, 29

Seigniorialism, 69

Serfdom, 100

Service, 60

as policy, 8-10, 17
industrial estate, 25-26, 28

Ship, 4, 53

Shoppers' World, 16

Shopping center, 15-20, 47, 51, 52
compared with village community,
70fr

Sixty-Fifth Street Industrial District,
24

Slough Trading Estate, 21
Smith, Adam, 55
Social sciences, 2, 4
anthropology, 1, 3, 4, 5

failure of, 1

new data, 95

sociology, 1, 3, 4

unit of analysis in, 3
Social structure, 93
Southland Center, 47
Sovereignty, 32, 75, 79, 83, 85-92, 95,
105 {See also Government,
Subdivision)

beginnings of, 86fr, 97-99

critical point in development of, 97

end of, 102

powers of, 86

spread of, 98

as a transition stage in social evo-
lution, 103
Stanford Industrial Park, 25
State, 86ff, 95 {See also Government,

Sovereignty, Subdivision)
Stateless societies, 95
Statler, Ellsworth M., 11
Sterling Forest, 47
Stevens, Marshall, 21
Store, 52

Subdivision, 24, 31-32, 49, 52, 55-59,
78-79, 83, 86-87, 91 {See also
Sovereignty)
condominium, 49, 52, 83
conflict of interests, 55-57, 78-79,

86-87, 91
effects of, 24, 31-32, 83, 86
Subsidy, 10-11, 20, 27-28, 35-36, 49-

50, 53
Suburbia, 16
Sumeria, 97-98, 103
Sunshine State Industrial Park, 24

Taxation, 89-90

alternative to, 62-63
Tenant selection, 18, 23, 25, 63, 65,

66, 70
Theater, 4, 51-53
Thompson, Dorothy, 36
Tikopia, 70
Toth, Louis, 65
Toynbee, Arnold, 96
Trafford Park, 2 1

118

The Art o, Community

Trailer, 29

Trailering parks and campgrounds,

4, 29, 33
Train, 4, 13, 51, 53
Traveler, 8-9, 13
Tremont House, 10
Tribal chief {See Village headman)
Tuxedo Park, 41

University City, 47
Urban blight, 85

Urban Land Institute, 41, 42, 101
Urban renewal (See Land redevel-
opment)

Veterans' Administration, 16
Village community, 52, 53, 69-74, 96
(See also Cooperative)
cooperative form, 73-74

Villafe 74, 96, 104

Voluntet -on, 79-85

Wank, Roland, 21

Watson, William, 104

Western civilization, 1, 4, 95, 97, 105
{See also Industrial revolu-
tion)
crisis, 105

industrial progress, 96

trend, 47, 95
Westwood Village, 15
Whitman, Walt, 37
Williamson, Jefferson, 1 1
Windsor, Bill, 64
Wittfogel, Karl, 97
Wong, Gilbert, 23
Woodall's Publishing Company, 32
Wren, Sir Christopher, 103

Zoning, 30, 42-43, 71

■iilliHMilli

8048332300

UEM

universidad

FRANCISCO MARROQUIN

Este libro debe ser devuelto
en la ultima fecha marcada

THE ART OF COMMUNITY

by Spencer Heath MacCallum

As both a student and a practitioner of "the
proprietary community idea," Mr. MacCallum
has distilled in this book his years of research
and experience in real estate development and
allied fields. His formal academic work in art
and anthropology, supplemented by independent
study in economics and philosophy, has produced
a sophisticated perspective that challenges many
traditional assumptions about viable societal
arrangements.

The author begins with a discussion of the
modern hotel as a prototype of an ideally func-
tioning community and then proceeds to survey
several contemporary types of real estate enter-
prise. His examination covers the recent history
of their development and goes on to include an
analysis of their str icture and function, which
are subsequently compared with certain societal
principles and practices found in supposedly
primitive communities.

Mr. MacCallum forsees a radically new form
of society based on voluntary contracts among
individuals, which promises to transcend present
geographical, political, and psychological ob-
stacles in human relationships. In depicting the
outlines of an open society of contract and show-
ing how it already seems to be evolving, he closes
the gap between purely theoretical speculations
and the specific practices that produce social
harmony. His construct preserves private own-
ership and control of property, entirely inde-
pendent of political sanctions, while establishing
methods to provide services so often preempted
by the State. He shows how we are beginning to
move away from the political regimentation of
life and toward contractual, voluntary associa-
tions which fulfill all functions needed for an
orderly and creative community.

THE AUTHOR

Spencer MacCallum is a graduate of I
Phillips Academy at Andover, Massa-
chusetts, and Princeton University. He re-
ceived his Master of Arts degree in social
anthropology at the T^iiiversity of Washing-
ton and has pursued additional graduate!
work at The University of Chicago. In 1956
he and his grandfather. Spencer Heath,i
founded The Science of Society Foundation,!
which brought out a number of publications:
including Citadel, Market and Altar. Be-
sides doing his own advanced study and
writing, Mr. MacCallum has been active in
research and lecturing for both academic
and business clients. He has recently as^
sisted the Princeton University Art Mu-
seum as consulting anthropologist and is
currently working with A'vr J ^wi & Asso-
ciates, of Los Angeles, and other engineer-
ing and management consulting firms.